Er... what can I say? Yes there is. In fact, this is a prime example. "I don't like software methodology because the people who do it either wear suits or they're trying to be cool."
So maybe I look like a stupid jerk to you, but I can deal with that. You, on the other hand, now look like a stupid jerk to everybody.
No, your expression of it has not remained constant. Consider the post I responded to. This was an ill thought-out rant and I correctly picked you up on the more idiotic of your rantings. On the other hand, the post that you hold up to be a shining example of your opinions, is well thought-out, calm and reasoned.
And your argument is merely that I should have read the better post and based my response upon that. This is irrational.
You should really look up the word "lie" and find out what one is.
Other people misinterpreting your loose prose due to the fact you were more interested in flaming evangelists than in discussing the matter at hand, is not "them lying". Grow up.
The positive contribution was that I identified the flaw in the group's use of XP, while he was unable or unwilling to... prefering instead to attack the very idea that a methodology isn't useful unless you actually do what it says.
Of course, you can selectively ignore whatever you like.
You're right. I didn't click on the link. Boy, do I feel stupid. If I'd known that the link contained opinions which completely disagreed with the opinions you were posting at the time I would have read it to get a more balanced view of your confusion.
If you're backing down from your earlier position that dismisses XP out-of-hand, I have no quarrel with you. And if you just think before posting crap like that it the future, I'll have no quarrel with you in the future.
This sounds reasonable to me. You're the one getting all arsey about this. Apparently when you miscommunicate your opinions it's other people's fault?
No, you're incorrect. In both my posts, I referred to unit testing as the element this group missed from XP which caused it to fail. I engaged in some meta-discussion as well, I'll admit that freely, but Salamander's reponse was entirely meta-discussion.
I read his good post on this topic. It was good. The one I was responding to, however, was lousy.
As I pointed out in a previous post, which you should have read before responding, XP is great but it's no panacea
OK, I had to respond to this in particular because I just tried to find this previous post to which you allude. You're referring here to a post on another thread. Sorry, friend, but it's not reasonable to expect people to follow everything you write before responding to a specific post. I just took your post at face value. If it didn't represent your views that's nobody's fault but your own.
Re-reading the post I responded to I found you to be obnoxious and smug, and dismissive of XP out-of-hand. I do not therefore feel badly about making the response I made.
But I'm glad that this isn't your real opinion, because that would be really stupid.
People who get personally offended by a methodology deserve rudeness and condescension. You got off lightly by my standards. Regardless of any previous posts you may have made, I was responding to the content of this one.
In any case, all you're rebutting here are my side comments. You seem to have failed to take on board my actual point, which is that clearly this organization was not doing XP and therefore it does not represent a fair case study for XP's applicability.
See, some of us like to add some information and discussion of the point in hand as well as responding to the irrational content of posts.
It must be created by talented software engineers that understand what the customer's needs are.
What you're implicitly saying here is that the software engineers should take the time out before coding to talk to the customer and fully understand his needs.
Unfortunately, the customer's needs change over the time of the project - so a mechanism is needed to update the engineers' understanding of the customer's needs.
XP puts this mechanism in place. That's why the subtitle of the first book is "EMBRACE CHANGE".
The interesting thing is that even if you don't know anything about management, you can read about XP and understand the problems it addressed and solutions it proposes. For some reason I find something strange about people saying that we shouldn't bother to think about or discuss management technique, because you either know it or you don't. It's this attitude which has created the current crop of incompetent managers, and unless the future managers can break the habit, we'll be just as incompetent.
"If your managers have any understanding of the software development process," they can still be swamped by change and complexity.
A basic tenet of XP is that you write unit tests as you go along, and system tests as you integrate, and you run them all daily. If they fail, the number one priority is to fix the code. If this software "never once worked properly" they were clearly not doing this.
You might be personally offended by XP's insistence you do actual tests of your code, and then fix the code when it breaks, but this requirement hardly qualifies XP as "fragile".
So "without knowing anything" except the fact that the software never worked we can indeed determine that they had missed one crucial component of XP... hell, of any software engineering.
The XP books, incidentally, do not claim that you have to do all of XP for it to be useful, and they don't claim either that XP is good for every project. YMMV.
Let me know when you come up with a better methodology than XP. I'd love to hear it.
If you want to say all immigrants of Chinese descent are traitors, why don't you come out and say it directly?
Oh come on, he wasn't saying that at all. Talk about over-reaction!
He's merely making the quite reasonable point that enemy agents could quite conceivably take jobs in high places and plant Trojan Horses of one form or another. Or, more likely, enemy sympathizers could be persuaded to plant Trojans.
Saying it's possible is not the same as saying that every single Chinese immigrant is actually doing this today, now is it?
The Cold War is over, but it seems the USA is intent on starting another one, with China.
China are supposedly "running out of room" in China, so some people are saying they'll need to invade somewhere soon.
The Brits, on the other hand, need saving from the USA - with every UK politician it seems proud to be seen with Uncle Sam's hand down his pants, they welcome the destruction of countryside to make way for the USA's missile defence early warning stations. If our land can make the USA a safer place from Those Who Would Question Capitalism then you're welcome to it!
But the worst thing is, we're all out of new colors. I hear that brown is the new purple, but in my book blue is the new red.
Oops, brought up for another one of my off-the-cuff remarks;)
Yeah, I entirely agree. In the case where the opposing population is not on your side, seizing control of the government doesn't put them on your side. In the converse case, seizing government is all that's required.
The broader point - to which we are agreeing - is that the government and the people are two quite separate entities. You make a good illustration of this.
Of course, anyone as obsessed with consumption as this is *bound* to choose capitalism over socialism. Come on, the microwave makes capitalism better than socialism???
Not acquisition, acquiescence... you want the enemy to do what you say. That might be an invasion, but equally it might be to protect one country (BROWN) from another country (RED) as in this example.
Any method for achieving this acquiescence by force on a national scale could validly be called war. Whether that's hacking into their military tactical systems or dropping a neutron bomb on their capitol.
War is more about getting the opposing government to do what you want, rather than getting the opposing population to do what you want. The latter always requires torture and slaughter.
The point of war is to secure the acquiescence of your opposition. Killing the opposing legion's fighters is just the first and most basic way of doing that.
Slashdot Mirror
Brave man! He's putting his car at risk from being keyed by a million Borg drones, or even being driven into hard by a *BSD advocate.
So maybe I look like a stupid jerk to you, but I can deal with that. You, on the other hand, now look like a stupid jerk to everybody.
And your argument is merely that I should have read the better post and based my response upon that. This is irrational.
Other people misinterpreting your loose prose due to the fact you were more interested in flaming evangelists than in discussing the matter at hand, is not "them lying". Grow up.
Of course, you can selectively ignore whatever you like.
You're right. I didn't click on the link. Boy, do I feel stupid. If I'd known that the link contained opinions which completely disagreed with the opinions you were posting at the time I would have read it to get a more balanced view of your confusion.
This sounds reasonable to me. You're the one getting all arsey about this. Apparently when you miscommunicate your opinions it's other people's fault?
I read his good post on this topic. It was good. The one I was responding to, however, was lousy.
OK, I had to respond to this in particular because I just tried to find this previous post to which you allude. You're referring here to a post on another thread. Sorry, friend, but it's not reasonable to expect people to follow everything you write before responding to a specific post. I just took your post at face value. If it didn't represent your views that's nobody's fault but your own.
Re-reading the post I responded to I found you to be obnoxious and smug, and dismissive of XP out-of-hand. I do not therefore feel badly about making the response I made.
But I'm glad that this isn't your real opinion, because that would be really stupid.
People who get personally offended by a methodology deserve rudeness and condescension. You got off lightly by my standards. Regardless of any previous posts you may have made, I was responding to the content of this one.
In any case, all you're rebutting here are my side comments. You seem to have failed to take on board my actual point, which is that clearly this organization was not doing XP and therefore it does not represent a fair case study for XP's applicability.
See, some of us like to add some information and discussion of the point in hand as well as responding to the irrational content of posts.
Try working with a DOG in the office.
The people you're launching your ad hominem arguments at are trying to solve a significantly harder problem.
What you're implicitly saying here is that the software engineers should take the time out before coding to talk to the customer and fully understand his needs.
Unfortunately, the customer's needs change over the time of the project - so a mechanism is needed to update the engineers' understanding of the customer's needs.
XP puts this mechanism in place. That's why the subtitle of the first book is "EMBRACE CHANGE".
The interesting thing is that even if you don't know anything about management, you can read about XP and understand the problems it addressed and solutions it proposes. For some reason I find something strange about people saying that we shouldn't bother to think about or discuss management technique, because you either know it or you don't. It's this attitude which has created the current crop of incompetent managers, and unless the future managers can break the habit, we'll be just as incompetent.
"If your managers have any understanding of the software development process," they can still be swamped by change and complexity.
By the way, I love the .sig ;)
4. Don't do any projects with more than 5 people
Because your methodology does not work on a large team.
Oh, and I also advise people like you to read more books.
"To the MAX!" is the slogan for the GameStation 252 and 256, not Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie ;)
You might be personally offended by XP's insistence you do actual tests of your code, and then fix the code when it breaks, but this requirement hardly qualifies XP as "fragile".
So "without knowing anything" except the fact that the software never worked we can indeed determine that they had missed one crucial component of XP ... hell, of any software engineering.
The XP books, incidentally, do not claim that you have to do all of XP for it to be useful, and they don't claim either that XP is good for every project. YMMV.
Let me know when you come up with a better methodology than XP. I'd love to hear it.
So we as next-generation managers should be fighting this tendency, not promulgating it.
BOYCOTT THINKGEEK!
Oh come on, he wasn't saying that at all. Talk about over-reaction!
He's merely making the quite reasonable point that enemy agents could quite conceivably take jobs in high places and plant Trojan Horses of one form or another. Or, more likely, enemy sympathizers could be persuaded to plant Trojans.
Saying it's possible is not the same as saying that every single Chinese immigrant is actually doing this today, now is it?
China are supposedly "running out of room" in China, so some people are saying they'll need to invade somewhere soon.
The Brits, on the other hand, need saving from the USA - with every UK politician it seems proud to be seen with Uncle Sam's hand down his pants, they welcome the destruction of countryside to make way for the USA's missile defence early warning stations. If our land can make the USA a safer place from Those Who Would Question Capitalism then you're welcome to it!
But the worst thing is, we're all out of new colors. I hear that brown is the new purple, but in my book blue is the new red.
Yeah, I entirely agree. In the case where the opposing population is not on your side, seizing control of the government doesn't put them on your side. In the converse case, seizing government is all that's required.
The broader point - to which we are agreeing - is that the government and the people are two quite separate entities. You make a good illustration of this.
Of course, anyone as obsessed with consumption as this is *bound* to choose capitalism over socialism. Come on, the microwave makes capitalism better than socialism???
Any method for achieving this acquiescence by force on a national scale could validly be called war. Whether that's hacking into their military tactical systems or dropping a neutron bomb on their capitol.
War is more about getting the opposing government to do what you want, rather than getting the opposing population to do what you want. The latter always requires torture and slaughter.
The point of war is to secure the acquiescence of your opposition. Killing the opposing legion's fighters is just the first and most basic way of doing that.
Nice one.