Profit sharing would be more effective because it motivates on both the cost and the revenue side of things. If the team feels like it can't directly contribute to improving sales (revenue), then perhaps they will be motivated to reduce costs. In order for this to work, the company cannot use a command-and-control method of management. Individuals must be given leeway to independently take action to make improvements. If these two things aren't in place then it will all just lead to apathy and cynicism. I suggest checking out lean software development and agile software development resources. My sig contains a good starting point, but it is more management oriented. I also have a couple of articles about metrics in particular. This article about metrics is good.
We're homeschooling. Educational games play a part of that. We have games from the "Reader Rabbit" series as well as a few other one-offs such as "Physicus" which is a cool physics simulator/tutorial/game and "Rosetta Stone" for Arabic and Chinese. However, much as he doesn't mind these, they are not what gets him really interested. He's been a Civ player for over a year... and he's only seven and a half. Right now he loves CivIV. He is starting to learn the difference between strategy and tactics, learning about planning, and of course, learning some things about history from the game itself. However, we have found that we need to put tight limits on his time playing. Currently, he plays CivIV only on weekends, and only in the time he has available when we're not doing other things (visiting, groceries, etc.). We have had some struggles with obsessive game-playing and we are trying to moderate that, but given that I myself go through periods of intense game playing (and so does my wife), we have to balance that with our own example. When we first got CivIV, we didn't do much else except eat for about three days... I truly hope that this is not a problem. I haven't seen anything conclusive about this and we do have a balance with visiting, regular academic work, and my son is an avid reader as well. I'm not worried, but like with television or other forms of entertainment, I don't think that children are able to set their own boundaries very well. It's important as parents to do that both verbally and by example. For those interested, my wife keeps an extensive web site about homeschooling and some other things.
FWIW, I have known one of the founding partners at iSec, Jesse Burns, since high school. He's a very very smart guy with almost instinctual understanding of security issues and problems. This is a shameless plug for my friend's company: they're great and you'd do well to hire them if you want a good security audit or training done.
You're sorta right: I don't work for that site (although I had a really good laugh from it)... but I am trying to promote my own. I'm not going to make any excuses except that when I read the article about Google, it honestly did remind me of what I've been working on with Agile methods. Since agile seems to be working well for me in real work environments with people actually enjoying their jobs, and with clients actually getting what they want, I figured it might be okay to point out the similarities. Was it a stretch? Maybe. But I also happen to really like abstractions and the thing about abstractions is that it's hard to talk about them without using a particular sort of language which can, admittedly, sound a lot like BS. Oh well.
The book "Built to Last" is an excellent analysis of how companies that have a very specific and strongly-held set of core values, combined with a few other attributes, tend to last as successful organizations for decades, regardless of what is happening in their business environment. I highly recommend reading this book to anyone who is interested in creating a strong company. The "Do no evil" mantra falls into this type of core values. The article itself doesn't really discuss this, as it is more focused on making their employees more effective.
This is a complex problem. First off, funding for institutions of higher learning comes from a multitude of sources. Colleges need to attract funding and in order to do that they need to attract students. In order to attract students, they need to create programs that are attractive to students. In Canada, colleges and universities are publicly funded and their funding is largely based on the number of students. This competition for students is unfortunate because students who are 19 years old tend to be relatively short-sighted about what constitutes a good education.
Secondly, I believe almost any course of study can become excellent education depending on the teachers/instructors/professors. My father is probably the best professor one could ever have: his background as a professional fine artist combined with experience in education and volunteer activities, plus his interest in philosophy and science makes him singularly capable of delivering an excellent course regardless of the subject matter. He is constantly creating new and better methods of instruction for his courses that he teaches at Keyano College. Incidentally, he has been investigating the creation of a game design program at the college... because it is cutting edge in terms of the arts!
I personally strongly feel that if I had focused on a purely technical or vocational path in my education I would not be nearly as far along in my career as I am. I studied sociology, philosophy, anthropology, linguistics, French, Russian, marketing and accounting in addition to my core computer science and mathematics classes. The benefits of these classes have become clear 15 years later as I am doing management consulting for Agile methods. If a program is going to be about game design, make sure that it includes a diversity of relevent subject matter such as gender studies, theatre, story-writing, linguistics, adult educational theory, etc. in addition to the technical stuff.
I actually haven't seen this in an IM client, but it would be cool. Tie in to a networking system like LinkedIn or build in the capacity so that if you choose, you can browse and create connections through your friends list.
Would the single letter domains allow for international characters? This would be a cool way of reducing the contention for the English/Roman single letters. The article didn't mention this, but it seems to me like it may be possible already given the IDN standards.
I like the user interface, but it would be cool if they would allow us to enter more than one "seed" artist. For example, I like Benny Bennassi, Patsy Cline and Rachmaninov. It would be cool to enter those three "seeds" and get some bizarre combination or mix of techno, country and classical. Fun!
Also drives this need to keep hardware around longer. A major piece of software for internal corporate IT might take several years to build, and then last a couple of decades. Suddenly it becomes important to have a fairly stable hardware environment.
I use qmail for my servers and it can do this quite easily in a number of ways. There are lots of good online documents about qmail as well as the official qmail site. The simplest method is probably a default install with a.qmail-default file in the alias directory which has two entries in it. Each entry could be a different destination email address or local account. This would certainly duplicate the email coming through, but may not be the best way to do your job. Working with the qmail-smtpd program may get you a solution closer to your needs. Good luck!
If this works (eventually) with humans, who will get access to it? How will we justify the use of this when so many people die very young from preventable causes that are beyond their control (as opposed to simply not taking care of oneself)? How will we prevent the extreme accumulation of wealth that this would allow if it is not equally accessible to everyone?
No it's not. At least with nothing there is a chance that a person will know there is something missing. With this, we run the risk that people will think, "Oh! I already know this story. No point in reading it now."
I've only read a very small sampling of great literature. A bit of Charles Dickens, Charlotte and Emily Bronte, Leo Tolstoy, and a few others. I can't claim to be well-read in this regard.
However, the little that I have read has had substantial benefit to me. I have been exposed to life circumstances, themes, thoughts, philosophies in a depth that has expanded my ability to see outside my own limited experiences, empathize and sympathize with other people, see the possibility that I might be wrong or prejudiced. As well, my use of language has improved in terms of vocabulary, style and metaphor.
There is no way that anyone can convince me that simplifying and making this literature "more accessible" is in any way beneficial except in the most limited fact-retention sense. Knowing the facts of a plot comes nowhere close to experiencing the expression of those facts in a sublime piece of literature.
That said, I appreciate the sentiment. I think there is a lot of legitimate concern that students do not get exposed to these sorts of literary works. However, this approach is at best a bandaid over a minor symptom of a much deeper problem. How much better would it be to address the real problems of the quality of our education and child-raising? I'm not saying that I know the real solution... that is beyond me... but I can see when something is missing the mark, and possibly harmful.
Lots of related concepts around agility, management, teamwork, prioritization, queues, lean, adult learning, coaching, testing etc. all can be found on the blog Agile Advice - How and Why to Work Agile - The Middle Way to Excellence. If you like this chapter, I think you will enjoy a good portion of the entries on that site. I run the blog and I am the primary contributor, but there are a few other regular contributors as well and I have recently opened up a Guest account for anyone to contribute articles. (Yes, I know, a dangerous thing:-).
You're right. From a libertarian or objectivist view that is true. However, I didn't say anything about capitalism. I was referring to competition and the two are not the same thing. Government is there to protect people from excesses of competition. A very simple example of this is someone who wishes to win no matter the cost to others and decides to try to kill their competitors. Government establishes laws, procedures and policing to, as much as possible, prevent this sort of excessive competitive behavior. Capitalism is a limited form of competition with a framework of rules (imposed and enforced by government). Capitalism, despite protestations to the contrary from some quarters, is not a worldview philosophy.
Our cultural trust in competition stems from a few sources, among them the misguided "survival of the fittest" notion, the obvious but incomplete material success of economic competition in our capitalist system, the system of competitive checks and balances in government, our perpetual quest to find an enemy to fight (communism, terrorism), and some things like the popularity of competitive sports.
Don't get me wrong: I think that some competition is very important for a number of reasons including motivation, efficiency, etc. However, our culture is so heavily geared towards competition that it lacks the balanced perspective that could be had by also considering the relevence of collaboration.
To get back to your comment... Typically, we don't look to government to encourage collaboration. But at least theoretically, it could. (Except that it would be incredibly hypocritical and therefore emasculated in its power to help others collaborate.)
The problems with intellectual property of all sorts (copyrights, patents, trade marks, service marks) stem from a fundamental belief that competition is the most efficient mechanism for progress. This belief means that government's role is to protect players from excessive competition by granting intellectual property monopolies. Unfortunately, this has the side effect of strengthening the cultural forces against collaboration. Open source software development, which is fundamentally a collaborative model (collaborate to build code, collaborate to share code, etc.), is showing that such a model can be successful. However, given the competitive intellectual property culture, open source models are extremely vulnerable. My thought: over the course of the next few decades, the software world will become a proving ground to demonstrate that collaborative economic models are superior to competitive economic models. However, the vested interests in the competitive model will only very slowly come around to embracing the collaborative model.
...three methods: plain old html/css, Movable Type, and Blogger. Each has distinct advantages and disadvantages:
POHtml/css: ultimate in flexibility for layout and publishing. Pain in the butt to update and maintain.
Movable Type: good balance between flexibility, built-in dynamic features and maintainability. Irritating to keep up-to-date for software versions, and a little slow for some of the dynamic features.
Blogger: easiest to use by far. Nice integrated anti-comment-spam. Not very flexible in comparison.
For comments and trackbacks I use HaloScan. For pinging blog trackers I use Ping-O-Matic. I don't run any blogs that are super popular, but my Agile Advice blog has a good niche following with about 300 hits/day after six months of development.
I've used Movable Type as a CMS system for my consulting/training web site too. It is flexible enough that I can make it do what I need for site layout, permanent (non-blog) articles, and the blog features are mostly turned off, except for publishing news items/announcements. I'm not a layout or graphics prodigy so I like the fairly simple default layouts provided by MT.
I've done a lot of work with testing and on occaision, I have had to test tests. It's a funny thing - the whole notion of the ideal qualities of a test is something that very few people seem to have even thought about (unlike, for example, the ACID qualities of a database). The vast majority of QA/QS people that I know have a very limited theoretical framework for testing. Testing is not thought of as "proving" software, as it could be. Holes in quality can easily come in if development is being done that is not directly tied to a test. TDD, ATDD (Acceptance Test Driven Development), and continuous integration, if done rigorously, can pretty much guarantee zero defect rates on new development. Adding these into an existing project after the fact is very difficult, but still has substantial benefits.
Using automated unit test frameworks such as JUnit is one of the most important engineering practices in the whole suite of agile practices. Many agile practices that don't explicitly ask for test-driven development still will insist that Agile is enabled by technology that allows for fluid, testable work. I'm very interested in Agile applied outside of software, and the underlying principles and practices of Agile. The situations where it can apply best have some sort of technological support for automation, and in particular automation of tests. I have seen situations where spending >$50,000.00 to build a custom automated test harness is money well spent in order to avoid mistakes in the first place. One of the main principles of Lean (a heavy source of influence for Agile), is that you can only go fast if you have exceptionally high quality. Any source of defects slows a project/team/production line down.
I've written up a brief introduction to the qualities of an ideal test. The great thing about unit test frameworks such as JUnit, NUnit, CPPUnit, etc. is that they manage to satisfy all of these qualities: Decisive, Valid, Complete, Repeatable, Isolated and Automated. (Although it is possible to break some of these qualities with poor test creation practices.)
Schedule, Quality and Scope in Agile
on
Microsoft Lauds Scrum
·
· Score: 3, Informative
The big difference between agile methods like scrum and extreme programming as compared to other methods like RUP or waterfall is how they treat the "iron triangle" of schedule, quality and scope. Agile methods specifically say: sacrifice scope in favor of super-high quality and fixed very short schedules. Scrum, for example, recommends that teams produce potentially shippable software every month. Potentially shippable doesn't mean every feature under the sun, but it does mean that it should be production-quality. As for large organizations adopting agile methods, there is definitely a transition period where the focus is on getting used to the monthly cycle and gradually increasing quality from the organization's norm to a much higher standard. Sometimes this can take a couple of years. This type of schedule does cause a huge amount of pressure... but every agile method that I know also encourages a sustainable pace including very little overtime work. I have worked on many agile projects over the last nine years and every time the benefits have been clear and compelling. Nevertheless, it is possible, like with anything else, to screw it up and have a bad experience with an agile method. Pair programming from Extreme Programming is a great example of this. It is a fabulous way to increase quality without sacrificing productivity. Yet it is also such a huge change for many developers that it needs to be adopted with great sensitivity. If it is imposed, then people will rebel against it and cause it to fail. Same with agile methods in general.
I've seen them work too many times to not be a believer, but if one's first experience with an agile method is a disaster, it can be pretty hard to see how they might help: be more effective, more humane and more fun. I strongly recommend that people check out the agile manifesto and the agile work axioms to understand the underlying ideas behind the agile methods.
Slashdot Mirror
Profit sharing would be more effective because it motivates on both the cost and the revenue side of things. If the team feels like it can't directly contribute to improving sales (revenue), then perhaps they will be motivated to reduce costs. In order for this to work, the company cannot use a command-and-control method of management. Individuals must be given leeway to independently take action to make improvements. If these two things aren't in place then it will all just lead to apathy and cynicism. I suggest checking out lean software development and agile software development resources. My sig contains a good starting point, but it is more management oriented. I also have a couple of articles about metrics in particular. This article about metrics is good.
We're homeschooling. Educational games play a part of that. We have games from the "Reader Rabbit" series as well as a few other one-offs such as "Physicus" which is a cool physics simulator/tutorial/game and "Rosetta Stone" for Arabic and Chinese. However, much as he doesn't mind these, they are not what gets him really interested. He's been a Civ player for over a year... and he's only seven and a half. Right now he loves CivIV. He is starting to learn the difference between strategy and tactics, learning about planning, and of course, learning some things about history from the game itself. However, we have found that we need to put tight limits on his time playing. Currently, he plays CivIV only on weekends, and only in the time he has available when we're not doing other things (visiting, groceries, etc.). We have had some struggles with obsessive game-playing and we are trying to moderate that, but given that I myself go through periods of intense game playing (and so does my wife), we have to balance that with our own example. When we first got CivIV, we didn't do much else except eat for about three days... I truly hope that this is not a problem. I haven't seen anything conclusive about this and we do have a balance with visiting, regular academic work, and my son is an avid reader as well. I'm not worried, but like with television or other forms of entertainment, I don't think that children are able to set their own boundaries very well. It's important as parents to do that both verbally and by example. For those interested, my wife keeps an extensive web site about homeschooling and some other things.
FWIW, I have known one of the founding partners at iSec, Jesse Burns, since high school. He's a very very smart guy with almost instinctual understanding of security issues and problems. This is a shameless plug for my friend's company: they're great and you'd do well to hire them if you want a good security audit or training done.
You're sorta right: I don't work for that site (although I had a really good laugh from it)... but I am trying to promote my own. I'm not going to make any excuses except that when I read the article about Google, it honestly did remind me of what I've been working on with Agile methods. Since agile seems to be working well for me in real work environments with people actually enjoying their jobs, and with clients actually getting what they want, I figured it might be okay to point out the similarities. Was it a stretch? Maybe. But I also happen to really like abstractions and the thing about abstractions is that it's hard to talk about them without using a particular sort of language which can, admittedly, sound a lot like BS. Oh well.
Lots of what they are doing is in line with the Agile Work Axioms and agile practices. For example:
The book "Built to Last" is an excellent analysis of how companies that have a very specific and strongly-held set of core values, combined with a few other attributes, tend to last as successful organizations for decades, regardless of what is happening in their business environment. I highly recommend reading this book to anyone who is interested in creating a strong company. The "Do no evil" mantra falls into this type of core values. The article itself doesn't really discuss this, as it is more focused on making their employees more effective.
This is a complex problem. First off, funding for institutions of higher learning comes from a multitude of sources. Colleges need to attract funding and in order to do that they need to attract students. In order to attract students, they need to create programs that are attractive to students. In Canada, colleges and universities are publicly funded and their funding is largely based on the number of students. This competition for students is unfortunate because students who are 19 years old tend to be relatively short-sighted about what constitutes a good education.
Secondly, I believe almost any course of study can become excellent education depending on the teachers/instructors/professors. My father is probably the best professor one could ever have: his background as a professional fine artist combined with experience in education and volunteer activities, plus his interest in philosophy and science makes him singularly capable of delivering an excellent course regardless of the subject matter. He is constantly creating new and better methods of instruction for his courses that he teaches at Keyano College. Incidentally, he has been investigating the creation of a game design program at the college... because it is cutting edge in terms of the arts!
I personally strongly feel that if I had focused on a purely technical or vocational path in my education I would not be nearly as far along in my career as I am. I studied sociology, philosophy, anthropology, linguistics, French, Russian, marketing and accounting in addition to my core computer science and mathematics classes. The benefits of these classes have become clear 15 years later as I am doing management consulting for Agile methods. If a program is going to be about game design, make sure that it includes a diversity of relevent subject matter such as gender studies, theatre, story-writing, linguistics, adult educational theory, etc. in addition to the technical stuff.
I actually haven't seen this in an IM client, but it would be cool. Tie in to a networking system like LinkedIn or build in the capacity so that if you choose, you can browse and create connections through your friends list.
Would the single letter domains allow for international characters? This would be a cool way of reducing the contention for the English/Roman single letters. The article didn't mention this, but it seems to me like it may be possible already given the IDN standards.
I like the user interface, but it would be cool if they would allow us to enter more than one "seed" artist. For example, I like Benny Bennassi, Patsy Cline and Rachmaninov. It would be cool to enter those three "seeds" and get some bizarre combination or mix of techno, country and classical. Fun!
Also drives this need to keep hardware around longer. A major piece of software for internal corporate IT might take several years to build, and then last a couple of decades. Suddenly it becomes important to have a fairly stable hardware environment.
I use qmail for my servers and it can do this quite easily in a number of ways. There are lots of good online documents about qmail as well as the official qmail site. The simplest method is probably a default install with a .qmail-default file in the alias directory which has two entries in it. Each entry could be a different destination email address or local account. This would certainly duplicate the email coming through, but may not be the best way to do your job. Working with the qmail-smtpd program may get you a solution closer to your needs. Good luck!
Check out Microsoft Takes it on the Chin Over Test-Driven Development. For comparison, check out Wikipedia on Test-Driven Development. This is particularly ironic given the recent Slashdot article about Microsoft adopting Scrum, one of the agile methodologies which, along with Extreme Programming, is instrumental in promoting Test-Driven Development as a core software engineering practice. I've also got a very brief article on my blog about the Qualities of an Ideal Test.
If this works (eventually) with humans, who will get access to it? How will we justify the use of this when so many people die very young from preventable causes that are beyond their control (as opposed to simply not taking care of oneself)? How will we prevent the extreme accumulation of wealth that this would allow if it is not equally accessible to everyone?
No it's not. At least with nothing there is a chance that a person will know there is something missing. With this, we run the risk that people will think, "Oh! I already know this story. No point in reading it now."
Okay, maybe I will say more.
I've only read a very small sampling of great literature. A bit of Charles Dickens, Charlotte and Emily Bronte, Leo Tolstoy, and a few others. I can't claim to be well-read in this regard.
However, the little that I have read has had substantial benefit to me. I have been exposed to life circumstances, themes, thoughts, philosophies in a depth that has expanded my ability to see outside my own limited experiences, empathize and sympathize with other people, see the possibility that I might be wrong or prejudiced. As well, my use of language has improved in terms of vocabulary, style and metaphor.
There is no way that anyone can convince me that simplifying and making this literature "more accessible" is in any way beneficial except in the most limited fact-retention sense. Knowing the facts of a plot comes nowhere close to experiencing the expression of those facts in a sublime piece of literature.
That said, I appreciate the sentiment. I think there is a lot of legitimate concern that students do not get exposed to these sorts of literary works. However, this approach is at best a bandaid over a minor symptom of a much deeper problem. How much better would it be to address the real problems of the quality of our education and child-raising? I'm not saying that I know the real solution... that is beyond me... but I can see when something is missing the mark, and possibly harmful.
Need I say more?
Lots of related concepts around agility, management, teamwork, prioritization, queues, lean, adult learning, coaching, testing etc. all can be found on the blog Agile Advice - How and Why to Work Agile - The Middle Way to Excellence. If you like this chapter, I think you will enjoy a good portion of the entries on that site. I run the blog and I am the primary contributor, but there are a few other regular contributors as well and I have recently opened up a Guest account for anyone to contribute articles. (Yes, I know, a dangerous thing :-).
You're right. From a libertarian or objectivist view that is true. However, I didn't say anything about capitalism. I was referring to competition and the two are not the same thing. Government is there to protect people from excesses of competition. A very simple example of this is someone who wishes to win no matter the cost to others and decides to try to kill their competitors. Government establishes laws, procedures and policing to, as much as possible, prevent this sort of excessive competitive behavior. Capitalism is a limited form of competition with a framework of rules (imposed and enforced by government). Capitalism, despite protestations to the contrary from some quarters, is not a worldview philosophy.
Our cultural trust in competition stems from a few sources, among them the misguided "survival of the fittest" notion, the obvious but incomplete material success of economic competition in our capitalist system, the system of competitive checks and balances in government, our perpetual quest to find an enemy to fight (communism, terrorism), and some things like the popularity of competitive sports.
Don't get me wrong: I think that some competition is very important for a number of reasons including motivation, efficiency, etc. However, our culture is so heavily geared towards competition that it lacks the balanced perspective that could be had by also considering the relevence of collaboration.
To get back to your comment... Typically, we don't look to government to encourage collaboration. But at least theoretically, it could. (Except that it would be incredibly hypocritical and therefore emasculated in its power to help others collaborate.)
The problems with intellectual property of all sorts (copyrights, patents, trade marks, service marks) stem from a fundamental belief that competition is the most efficient mechanism for progress. This belief means that government's role is to protect players from excessive competition by granting intellectual property monopolies. Unfortunately, this has the side effect of strengthening the cultural forces against collaboration. Open source software development, which is fundamentally a collaborative model (collaborate to build code, collaborate to share code, etc.), is showing that such a model can be successful. However, given the competitive intellectual property culture, open source models are extremely vulnerable. My thought: over the course of the next few decades, the software world will become a proving ground to demonstrate that collaborative economic models are superior to competitive economic models. However, the vested interests in the competitive model will only very slowly come around to embracing the collaborative model.
- POHtml/css: ultimate in flexibility for layout and publishing. Pain in the butt to update and maintain.
- Movable Type: good balance between flexibility, built-in dynamic features and maintainability. Irritating to keep up-to-date for software versions, and a little slow for some of the dynamic features.
- Blogger: easiest to use by far. Nice integrated anti-comment-spam. Not very flexible in comparison.
For comments and trackbacks I use HaloScan. For pinging blog trackers I use Ping-O-Matic. I don't run any blogs that are super popular, but my Agile Advice blog has a good niche following with about 300 hits/day after six months of development. I've used Movable Type as a CMS system for my consulting/training web site too. It is flexible enough that I can make it do what I need for site layout, permanent (non-blog) articles, and the blog features are mostly turned off, except for publishing news items/announcements. I'm not a layout or graphics prodigy so I like the fairly simple default layouts provided by MT.I've done a lot of work with testing and on occaision, I have had to test tests. It's a funny thing - the whole notion of the ideal qualities of a test is something that very few people seem to have even thought about (unlike, for example, the ACID qualities of a database). The vast majority of QA/QS people that I know have a very limited theoretical framework for testing. Testing is not thought of as "proving" software, as it could be. Holes in quality can easily come in if development is being done that is not directly tied to a test. TDD, ATDD (Acceptance Test Driven Development), and continuous integration, if done rigorously, can pretty much guarantee zero defect rates on new development. Adding these into an existing project after the fact is very difficult, but still has substantial benefits.
Using automated unit test frameworks such as JUnit is one of the most important engineering practices in the whole suite of agile practices. Many agile practices that don't explicitly ask for test-driven development still will insist that Agile is enabled by technology that allows for fluid, testable work. I'm very interested in Agile applied outside of software, and the underlying principles and practices of Agile. The situations where it can apply best have some sort of technological support for automation, and in particular automation of tests. I have seen situations where spending >$50,000.00 to build a custom automated test harness is money well spent in order to avoid mistakes in the first place. One of the main principles of Lean (a heavy source of influence for Agile), is that you can only go fast if you have exceptionally high quality. Any source of defects slows a project/team/production line down.
I've written up a brief introduction to the qualities of an ideal test. The great thing about unit test frameworks such as JUnit, NUnit, CPPUnit, etc. is that they manage to satisfy all of these qualities: Decisive, Valid, Complete, Repeatable, Isolated and Automated. (Although it is possible to break some of these qualities with poor test creation practices.)
The big difference between agile methods like scrum and extreme programming as compared to other methods like RUP or waterfall is how they treat the "iron triangle" of schedule, quality and scope. Agile methods specifically say: sacrifice scope in favor of super-high quality and fixed very short schedules. Scrum, for example, recommends that teams produce potentially shippable software every month. Potentially shippable doesn't mean every feature under the sun, but it does mean that it should be production-quality. As for large organizations adopting agile methods, there is definitely a transition period where the focus is on getting used to the monthly cycle and gradually increasing quality from the organization's norm to a much higher standard. Sometimes this can take a couple of years. This type of schedule does cause a huge amount of pressure... but every agile method that I know also encourages a sustainable pace including very little overtime work. I have worked on many agile projects over the last nine years and every time the benefits have been clear and compelling. Nevertheless, it is possible, like with anything else, to screw it up and have a bad experience with an agile method. Pair programming from Extreme Programming is a great example of this. It is a fabulous way to increase quality without sacrificing productivity. Yet it is also such a huge change for many developers that it needs to be adopted with great sensitivity. If it is imposed, then people will rebel against it and cause it to fail. Same with agile methods in general. I've seen them work too many times to not be a believer, but if one's first experience with an agile method is a disaster, it can be pretty hard to see how they might help: be more effective, more humane and more fun. I strongly recommend that people check out the agile manifesto and the agile work axioms to understand the underlying ideas behind the agile methods.