... but I got over it. Thankfully, I'd learned assembly first (not to mention having a decent understanding of digital electronics). Otherwise, I might have been permanently damaged (those of you who actually know me, keep your mouths shut).
FWIW: Dijkstra nailed it with "the teaching of BASIC should be rated as a criminal offense: it mutilates the mind beyond recovery." -- Dijkstra
Whoever described Agile in that way lied to you. I get tired of ignorant statements made folks who don't actually know anything about Agile software development.
Yes, Agile facilitates development of high quality software. The team I work on develops and maintains a distributed sensing and processing system including multiple CPUs, OS installations, something like 100 purpose-built software components, several hundred off-the-shelf software components, and custom hardware. These systems are deployed worldwide. Our open bug list is a small handful of low priority items. Over the last 5 years, we've averaged less than 1.5 bugs per month.
Turn around time for Agile development can be very fast. A typical deployment of new feature includes running many thousands of tests including unit tests, acceptance tests, and hardware integration tests. Without agile practices, these tests would require weeks to run. We'll run them in an afternoon. This means that a relatively small change can be quickly deployed.
Regarding "on the cheap": None of this comes cheap. It takes discipline and a lot of hard work. We pay very close attention to our process. It is not "on the cheap".
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FWIW: Dijkstra nailed it with "the teaching of BASIC should be rated as a criminal offense: it mutilates the mind beyond recovery." -- Dijkstra
Yes, Agile facilitates development of high quality software. The team I work on develops and maintains a distributed sensing and processing system including multiple CPUs, OS installations, something like 100 purpose-built software components, several hundred off-the-shelf software components, and custom hardware. These systems are deployed worldwide. Our open bug list is a small handful of low priority items. Over the last 5 years, we've averaged less than 1.5 bugs per month.
Turn around time for Agile development can be very fast. A typical deployment of new feature includes running many thousands of tests including unit tests, acceptance tests, and hardware integration tests. Without agile practices, these tests would require weeks to run. We'll run them in an afternoon. This means that a relatively small change can be quickly deployed.
Regarding "on the cheap": None of this comes cheap. It takes discipline and a lot of hard work. We pay very close attention to our process. It is not "on the cheap".