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A Decade of Agile Programming — Has It Delivered?
snydeq writes "InfoWorld offers a look back at the first decade of agile programming. Forged in February 2001 when a group of developers convened in Utah to find an alternative to documentation-driven, 'heavyweight' software development practices, The Manifesto for Agile Software Development sought to promote processes that accommodate changing requirements, collaboration with customers, and delivery of software in short iterations. Fast-forward a decade, and agile software development is becoming increasingly commonplace, with software firms adopting agile offshoots such as Scrum, Extreme Programming, and Kanban — a trend some see benefiting software development overall."
Well, yes and no.
There have been some developments since Brooks wrote No Silver Bullet that have helped by attacking the accidental complexity of software development - widespread use of garbage collection, for instance. But Brooks is still absolutely correct that the complexities of software have a lot more to do with the complexities of the human mental modeling, heuristics, and decisions that software replaces than they do with the challenge of converting that to something the computer can understand.
I am officially gone from
No true Scotsman fallacy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman