"You seem to fail to understand that there is no difference between designing a car and designing a software product.
All the things that go into designing a car should go into designing software. The fact that you don't do it that way shows the failure is you."
So you're saying that no bespoke software development should occur and end users should have no choice but to work with pre-packaged software whether it suits their needs or not?
Car manufacturing is a production line task based on a design determined by the experts and implemented as is. Bespoke software would, in contrast, be equivalent to each customer have the car designed as and how they want and each outcome looking and being completely different from the other such that they could not possibly be manufactured in a production line.
If you can't see the difference and don't understand the differences in the types of project then you're not qualified or experienced enough to be engaging in this discussion. What you say only holds true for pre-packaged software, which is a minority of the total development that is done across the globe.
Bespoke software development really is nothing like producing a car and anyone who thinks otherwise clearly has absolutely zero experience in actual delivery of bespoke software projects. I find it kind of ironic that you refer to engineering given that many engineering disciplines that do produce bespoke solutions suffer the same problems that software does and are in fact the source of some elements of agile in the first place. Certainly when I worked at an electromechanical engineering firm they had the exact same problems and solved them by moving to an agile process on a T&M charging basis.
In fact, even in the UK the NHS has made use of SCRUM in determining treatment methods for some illnesses because the duration of the project wasn't quantifiable beforehand and needed to be operated on a cost-controlled basis so that it could be axed if going beyond it's necessary goals.
So no, the GP isn't a problem. Understanding the way different types of project work isn't a problem in any way whatsoever - he does, but apparently you don't.
I think you're generalising now, to say good architecture is both draconian and something that the agile camp feigns away from is nonsense. Good architecture is neither draconian nor feigned away from, in fact, good architecture is central to agile - agile can only work if you work in a modular manner.
"but ultimately somebody needs to own the architecture, define the interfaces and make sure that it meets the non-functional requirements"
Yes, the technical architect. They'll be involved before the agile teams actually get into gear and get started and they'll have all those interfaces defined beforehand. Depending on whether you have one or more technical architects it's perfectly possible that the architecture phase is carried out as a sprint or a few sprints in itself before the developers even come along and start their sprints.
"Which is why the EU, just as any other governmentorial institution in this world, usually creates laws and decisions in favor of the big money, not the people."
Do you have any evidence of this? From what I've seen the EU seems to enact laws that are more in favour of the people than the laws enacted by the constituent governments of the member nations.
"And which is why a decision in favour of network neutrality, which would interfere with the profit maximization of the biggest European telcos, is improbable even if suggested by a top-rank commissioner. And if it really should become reality, it will be one of the rare exceptions to the rule."
Why do you think this? from laws on protecting natural woodland to laws limiting the charges mobile providers can charge when roaming through the EU to various human rights laws the EU has passed an awful lot of pro-citizen, anti-business laws.
The problem is that you seem to have assumed that your 15,000 lobbyists are all lobbying for big business, I don't think that's the case. Whilst there are a lot of big business lobbyists there the cost of lobbying the EP and EC is quite prohibitive due to it's relative size and broadness of languages and views such that corporate lobbying ends up being much less effective than it does at a national level.
In contrast, national groupings such as human rights charities and so forth tend to exist in every European nation and share the same goals, so it's easier for these to work together to lobby their respective national representatives in their native languages than it is for a company to do so. Having a few hundred staff on hand just for lobbying in the EU is going to rarely be worth it when you're out-lobbied by national groups with shared interests.
How is that hypocritical and which idiots modded this up?
What has a historical national court ruling got to do with future EU wide law planning?
There's nothing hypocritical there because you have two distinct bodies going different ways.
A dutch court has absolutely zero control over or relevance to future European Parliament legislation. If the EU goes ahead with this the dutch court will have to comply once it's government implements the relevant legislation.
They're not just directly elected by the people either, they're directed through a form of proportional representation so they're actually more representative of the make up of each nation's vote than most national parliaments are.
Certainly the consistency and spread of EP representatives of the UK are much more representative of popular support than our national government is.
There doesn't need to be any orchestration between teams that's really the point of good modular software design - each team is in effect just developing it's own product, at worst you'll have a team that binds it altogether.
But normally, you'll have team 1 building a web service that exposes methods a, b and c with well defined parameters beforehand, you'll have team 2 building a DLL that utilises those methods and can build against a mock version of the service, team 3 that utilises the DLL but they can just use a placeholder DLL for development and so on and so forth.
It's your integration testing team that will put them together to find bugs and report back to whichever team they deem to be at fault to fix it as a bug request.
I'm not trying to be insulting but if you've got a scenario where teams are fighting each other over things then your architect has already failed to properly modularise the software and separate concerns, and that certainly isn't what I mean by a good architect. I agree there are some technologies and platforms where modularity becomes difficult to achieve (i.e. some embedded systems), but in those cases I think you're just treading into territory where agile may not be the best fit anyway. If you're developing something with say, SoA though then it's trivial to just hand different teams different services and tell them what interfaces they have to build against - that way the teams don't ever even need to speak to each other even, they could even be spread across the globe and speak completely different languages as long as they get their module built and built to the interface that has been specified.
With regards to Windows 8 I don't think it's necessarily an apt comparison because Windows 8 has genuine issues that are objectively problematic, for example, new user interface concepts such as moving over hot areas to be able to access settings/shut down the system but no visual cue as to that fact such that for a user they can be left with just absolutely no idea how to shut down their system. That is objectively just a massive usability failing and is an example of one of many genuine issues with Windows 8.
Agile isn't any one set of ideas of methodologies but a number of them but the overarching trait of them is that they support management of projects where there is a lot of potential for requirements to change and hence tend to revolve around not having requirements set in stone from the outset in a single big monolithic document.
It means different things to different people and there is no one true agile methodology, but there are methodologies within agile that are very firmly defined like SCRUM.
The person you spoke to is wrong in implying agile is always like that, there version of it obviously is but that doesn't mean agile is always like they suggest.
"Agile however is just (as other have pointed out) another way to say 'we just throw any crap code at the wall that anyone wants to make, and see what sticks'"
No it's not. It can be used like that and is used like that by retards but agile also encompasses an awful lot of good ideas and some methodologies like SCRUM as sometimes the exactly right tool for the job to get things done more efficiently and effectively.
Don't mistake people having no idea what they're doing failing miserably and when questioned they say "Oh erm, yeah, I er, yeah I think it's because agile is the problem" when really they mean "I'm fucking shit at my job, I screwed up royally but refuse to admit it" for agile being actually like that.
It's not something you discuss and it's not a show stopper. Simply saying at a meeting on the morning "Actually, it was a bit warm yesterday, can we get it cooler in here?" isn't something that needs immediate drop-everything attention at the time and is trivial enough to be dealt with the following morning.
Yes, if you suddenly get an out of the blue massive rise in temperatures for some odd reason then do something about that immediately, it's common sense, you need that, but don't go fucking around every 5 minutes over the slightest little thing or you'll never ever getting anything done.
If the mid-day and afternoon sun starts to heat the office up such that by 3pm one of the developers finds it too warm to concentrate it's still better than they battle on for the last hour or two than it is for them to go to the other 5 - 10 developers on the team and ask if they're hot too and if they want a fan also given that it's pretty well documented that each disruption results in 15 - 20mins lost productivity. Effectively you're losing at least about an hour and a half of productivity for one developer's problem. Much better that at the morning standup someone raises it, the question is asked who else wants a fan, and then it's dealt with simply and effectively with only 30 seconds of lost time rather than 75 to 150 minutes of lost time. These sorts of trivial things stack up and cause real problems.
No wonder you posted AC, I wouldn't want to be associated with the sorts of nonsense you posted either.
"but it does have its drawbacks especially in dealing with larger teams and larger problems."
Although I agree with everything else you've said, I don't really agree with this. Things like SCRUM work perfectly well with large teams and large problems, because all you do is have sets of SCRUM teams of 5 developers or whatever each working on separate modules.
What this does mean is that you need really good architects however that can design a solution in a nice loosely coupled component based modular manner, and it does mean you need people who have an overview of those modules and can coordinate any interop between them - the people who do this may themselves even be an agile SCRUM team of their own, or they may just be the original architect or architects by themselves, or even a technical project manager or two.
There's no inherent reason why agile can't be well suited to large projects though, on the contrary, the larger a project gets the harder it is to control it with waterfall (due to the inherently greater scope for change) so things like scrum become more effective.
"Well, originally the task of the people that are now calling themselves "Police" was to beat the subjects of the ruling class into submission whenever they developed independent ideas. Sometimes also just for fun."
Not true in the slightest in the UK. The British police force was developed under the idea of policing by consent, that the police can police only with the consent of the citizenship because the citizens want a force to deal with murder and so forth, but not to beat them down.
This isn't about going back to those old times, it's about moving away from the old times and the original ideology behind British policing, and that's the problem.
Well said, it's the same with agile in general - most developers including all too many on Slashdot don't like it because it forces accountability. Of course you're not going to like standup meetings because when it gets to explaining what you did yesterday, "I trolled Slashdot all day" doesn't exactly sound that useful.
Judging by many of the posts here from various posters over the years I'd wager another reason is that a lot of people can't just admit when they were wrong, they'll jump to extreme absurdities and start talking nonsense and make no sense rather than admit they were wrong. Agile doesn't support that mindset well, because it requires developers who can admit what they did wrong and talk about how they can improve and avoid similar issues in the future. It requires the developer to be capable of introspection - to look at themselves and see how they can improve. If you believe you're perfect and never wrong then you're never going to be good enough to do agile.
You do need competent accountable developers to make agile work, if you have half-arsed layabouts who are never wrong then you're fucked. You're fucked anyway of course, it's just that your existing methodologies like waterfall mask it, because they can troll Slashdot day in day out for a number of weeks before anyone questions what they're doing at which point they make up some lame ass excuse about how something was proving to be more difficult than they originally thought but that they're "almost there" and then implement the half day job in half a day before repeating the cycle.
Or in other words bad developers hate agile because it requires them to do what they're actually paid to do.
Sorry but the actual problem is you. You're not a team player, you're not an effective developer, it's that simple.
The point of the standup is to keep everyone abreast of who is doing what and what problems they encountered. The benefits of this are things such as:
1) If someone falls ill, everyone else knows where he was upto so someone can take over
2) Talk about problems can cause others to offer solutions, or if the problem was already solved, to share solutions so others don't encountered similar problems
3) Raising more general problems such as "It was too hot in here to concentrate yesterday" so that the product owner/SCRUM master can go do something about that, like buy some fans
4) Raise upcoming potential problems before they occur, so that developers can prepare and plan for them
5) Provides general greater knowledge transfer - the team is more informed.
Yes you can do all of these things ad-hoc, but you're going to absolutely obliterate your teams productivity because they never know when the next arbitrary interruption is come from and they'll never have any idea when they know they'll have a fixed block of uninterrupted time to crack on with a difficult problem without interruptions.
If your standups are rolling on for more than 5 - 15 mins then yes, you're doing it wrong. They should be timeboxed and if they carry over then your devs are going into too much detail - the point is to say "I'm having trouble with problem x, anyone encountered it?" and then two people say yes, they know how to solve it - great, talk to them after the standup about it. The standup is just a summary - detail comes after.
Getting people together does not also take time and is a non-issue, you do it at a fixed time, and if someone isn't there you start without them. If that's a problem you raise it there and then as a problem and the responsible person deals with it. It's really not difficult.
With regards to solving problems when they happen, yes, if you can do that do that, but don't just arbitrarily interrupt the whole dev team to ask if they know anything about it and ruin their concentration, either drop them an e-mail and wait for them to get back to you, figure it out yourself, or get on with something else for the time being.
I'm not surprised that agile doesn't work for you, as you have all the traits of a classic anti-social developer who can't function well in a team - you don't care what anyone else is doing because you have no intention of carrying on their work if something happens to them, I guess that's "someone else's problem", you only want to talk to other people when it suits you, you don't care about their concentration or focus on a problem, if you get stuck you want to interrupt them when it suits you. Agile isn't designed to help people like you as individuals, it's designed to mitigate the issues people like you cause, it's designed to make whole teams more effective and that's what it does.
If you don't want to work as an effective team member that's okay, but do your team a favour and go find a job where you can do exactly that - sit in your isolation chamber and not be bothered by anyone else and similarly, not bother anyone else. You're just not well placed to function in a team and that's the real underlying source of your complaints, not agile.
Um, that's kind of the point. It caters to that very fact of life, and you charge them for it.
To put in a rather simplified manner, the agile business model for clients should basically be that:
You give them a rough estimate of the time needed for their initial requirements by number of sprints, so it may be say, 20 2 week sprints with a sprint of 5 developers be charged at x rate. You produce a product backlog of all tasks at the start and prioritise them with the customer. You have a burndown chart that shows roughly what will be completed each sprint, this chart is a simple graph of feature completion against time so it is normally just a straight diagonal line starting at the top left (no features completed at start), and ending at the bottom right (all features completed at end).
At the end of each sprint you produce something from the set of features for that sprint and show it to the client, if they want to change or add anything you throw it on the product backlog and update the burndown chart. It may be that at this point that that changes and it now finishes past the original estimation point. That means the client can see the impact of the changes they requested and consider whether they really do want to pay for an extra sprint or whatever, or if they want to remove other features to still hit the deadline.
It controls cost and that's the point, it forces the client to consider the impact of any changes they request. The downside for some clients is that they can't abuse holes in specs and contracts to hold you by the balls to do additional work for free that you hadn't budgeted for (because all specs and contracts have holes, period.) but the upside for more honest clients and for the company doing development is that the client gets exactly what they pay for, no more, no less. They don't get ripped off, and they don't get to rip you off. Instead of paying for an arbitrary packaged product which can easily have overruns the client is paying to use your resources at some specific markup, hence why costs are controlled.
I'll be the last person to believe that agile is a silver bullet, I know full well that it's just another tool for the toolbox to be used when appropriate but it is rather tiresome to see all the people complain about it who are using it wrong, and then often say "People always just tell me I'm using it wrong, but it's not me it must be agile!" - bullshit, you ARE using it wrong. It's like a lot of developers haven't really learnt the whys, whens, and hows of agile and so make a complete hash up of trying to implement it then blame the tool. To give a programming analogy, it's like writing something in C/C++ without fully understanding pointers - you'll probably just about get something running, but it's going to be a buggy bloated, memory leak laden mess.
If you genuinely understand agile, and if you know when and how to use it, then it's a brilliant tool, but if you're a fucking idiot then you'll still be a fucking idiot even if you try and use agile.
Many of the comments modded up so here reflect that inherent lack of understanding, people are saying things that are just flat out wrong and don't make any sense if you actually have even a basic understanding of the point and use of agile.
I've used agile (SCRUM) and waterfall extensively to deliver projects and I don't pretend either is better than the other all of the time, but I know enough to know that most of what's said here about agile is bullshit born from inexperience and/or incompetence.
Still trying to redefine piracy I see. I guess you're just not that smart and can't admit when you're wrong.
Also, last I checked international waters are international waters, not national waters, hence they're bound by international law, which is what the IWC's whaling prohibition falls under, so I've no idea how you got so confused as to think my stance had changed.
I see you've still dodged the contradictions you created though. It never ceases to amaze me how people like you do that when it'd just be easier to admit you were wrong. I guess you just like digging holes.
"2. You're talking about acts of warfare or enacting executive decisions."
Wrong. Piracy:
1. The practice of attacking and robbing ships at sea. 2. A similar practice in other contexts, esp. hijacking.
There is nothing about piracy that prevents it being an action by state actors, it is simply the seizure or hijacking of ships, if that happens at the behest of a state it is still piracy, there's no getting away from that. You're desperately trying to avoid admitting that you're wrong by attempting to play on semantics, but it doesn't work, because you're attempting to redefine the term in your own manner. You are not grand dictator of the English language, that's not something you get to do.
This is why Ford called the seizure of the Mayaguez piracy, because it was.
"Your incorrect definition of libertrarianism aside"
There you go again, trying to redefine the English language rather than admitting you're wrong. Libertarianism at it's core is a belief of minimal intervention by governing bodies, and that's exactly what you're arguing should be the case at sea - that there are no laws (you're wrong on that) governing the harvesting of resources. It wouldn't be so bad if you could at least fucking spell libertarianism before pretending you know what it is when you clearly don't.
"the issue of international waters is that of consensus"
What "issue"? Certainly the harvesting of whales isn't, that's why the IWC exists and why it stirs so much debate every year. There's certainly no consensus that Japan's whaling falls under the research exemption, which is precisely why they're finding themselves in court.
"This has nothing to do with libertrarianism and everything to do with sovereignty."
There we go again, that conflict is back, yet you've still failed to explain your reasoning on it. If it's about sovereignty then again, why do you believe Japan's sovereignty deserves to be valued more highly than that of the US, Australia and New Zealand? It's okay for Japan to not be dictated to and farm whales at will but it's okay for Japan to tell the US, Australia and so forth "tough shit, we don't care about your whale tourism industry and we're going to kill them all for ourselves"?
"Otherwise you could for example claim that any people on a cruiser that is located in Saudi Arabian waters that have sex without marriage are performing adultery, and should be completely legally punished for it under Saudi Arabian laws."
Um, if they're in Saudi Arabian waters, that's exactly how it works - it's still classed as Saudi Arabian territory where Saudi laws apply. By your logic it'd be okay to commit murder inside say British waters and the government could do nothing. How do you think interception of drug smuggling works? They catch them when they enter territorial waters precisely because that territory's laws apply.
Why not just do the easy thing and admit you're way out of your depth and stop digging? It's pretty obvious you don't know what you're on about given your definition of piracy and libertarianism conflict with the established definitions and that your understanding of maritime law is completely wrong? If you are going to carry on digging then please, do me at least one favour, explain why you think Japan has a greater right to exploit resources in international water destructively than other nations do non-destructively? Explain to me why you feel Japan overrules other nations on natural resources in international waters, I'm still really intrigued to hear your justification because you seem pretty determined to keep up the contradiction rather than simply admit you didn't really think it through and oversimplified.
"Microsoft should hire Infoword's writers as design consultants. Inforworld's staff doesn't have the luxury of being out of touch with users."
Judging by the fact that what was really just a simple article when it comes too was presented as some kind of faux-slideshow that randomly went white in the middle with a link return to slideshow (I assume my ad blocker half-killed a popup ad) I'd say they're perfectly well out of touch with users too.
"1. Which court specifically? Did it have jurisdiction over international waters, or was this a local court of some nation that has no legal jurisdiction over international waters and applies local laws that again have no jurisdiction, not unlike applying laws forcing women to wear veil and be always escorted by male companion?"
Wait, hang on a second, now you're saying that there is jurisdiction over international waters? What happened to your international free for all view of that? Have you abandoned that now? It's the International Court of Justice though if you were wondering.
"2. Piracy is a well established act that has remained largely unchanged in forms of violence and outcome for victims for thousands of years until it was largely eliminated as a form of violence in last century."
You don't know much about piracy do you? You realise even where sovereign nations in the past have seized ships of other nations for political reasons without any intention of real actual harm to the crew that it's still classed as piracy right?
I notice you completely ignored my question regarding the blatant contradictions your first come first served ideology of a complete free for all in international waters brings. Don't worry, I don't expect you to admit you were wrong explicitly, but I'll take your silence and apparent inability to address those contradictions as an admittance on your behalf that maybe it isn't quite as simple as you made out and that maybe first come first served in terms of pillaging natural resources in international territory causes quite some complexities such that the best option really is just no one gets it unless there is some kind of consensus on the issue, which, with whaling, there isn't.
"I must admit I'm intrigued at being called a libertrarian, considering just how critical I am of that particular political line of thinking."
Yet that's exactly what you're suggesting should be the case in international waters - a survival of the fittest, deregulated, free for all. A libertarian dream. This means that you're either betraying your own views, you don't know what libertarianism actually is, or you're lying about your feelings on libertarianism.
You're still showing absolutely no sense of proportion, if you think the conditions of Guantanamo are even close to that of the Japanese (or German for that matter) concentration camps then no, you don't study history, in fact, you don't know the first thing about it.
I think what George Bush did was criminal, but to compare it to what the Japanese did in World War II is absolutely fucking insane. Even ignoring the concentration camp issue you can't pretend that the hundreds of thousands who died through sectarian violence as an indirect result of the war is the same as the millions who were killed as a direct order of the Japanese leadership - not only is the scale larger but one was an indirect side effect caused by Bush's stupidity and the other was a direct order caused by Japanese malice.
What's perhaps most interesting is when you see an overlaid map of bovine TB and UK badger populations. It demonstrates pretty clearly that there's no link between the two, in fact, some of the areas in the UK with low bovine TB have plenty of badgers, and there are many areas with bovine TB that have no badgers.
When you see a correlation it doesn't necessarily imply causality but it does provide you a starting point to look for causality, but the problem in this case is there's not even a correlation, not even close, so to make the jump to cry causation like the government and farming unions have is just absurd, it makes no sense.
The problem is I would guess entirely about biosecurity in the South West and West of England, the farmers have done such a poor job of it that TB has become so rife in their cattle that they now can't eradicate it. The government complains that they're paying millions in compensation to farmers so the cull is necessary - that's stupid, what's necessary is to stop paying them any compensation for a problem they've caused themselves so that those who practice poor biosecurity go out of business and the more competent farmers from elsewhere in the UK can take over their land and do it properly.
The obvious question is if badgers are responsible for the spread of bovine TB then why have all those TB incidences up in the North and East of England and Scotland not translated into greater spreads? This highlights that it's about biosecurity - when TB is found in these parts of the country the farmers are properly dealing with it.
But what's particularly interesting is that if you look at the maps of the 2001 foot and mouth outbreak and the map of CJD occurrences in cattle the maps are not too dissimilar though for these two there are greater incidences in the North of England. I'd wager that after these incidents the North of England's farms upped their game, whilst the Western and South Western farms did not. I'd be surprised if it's a coincidence that time and time again this same section of the country sees farm animal disease outbreaks, whilst other parts of the country do not - that is a correlation that you could begin to seek causation from, unlike the badger/TB link where there is not even correlation.
We do need to end the compensation culture for farmers though, I'd guess that's in part to blame - making it profitable to have disease outbreaks is just stupid.
"1. It's not a crime. Please cite evidence to it being a crime if you wish to persist in pushing this lie."
Why the fuck do you think it's gone to court genius? To determine if it has broken the law.
The problem with libertarians like yourself is that you're not too sharp when it comes to thinking things through, to you it's a simplistic "Whales are a resource, whoever harvests them first gets them" and that's great until you recognise that they're a resource to other countries too like the US, Australia, New Zealand and so forth when kept alive because they create a multi-million dollar tourist industry. For some obscure arbitrary and so far undefined reason though you thus far seem to have decided the rights of Japan outweighs the rights of other nations. Care to elaborate on why Japan gets priority in your mind over other nations in exploiting this resource? What makes Japan so special as to get priority over everyone else?
"2. Because these facts about piracy are well established by credible historians worldwide over period of several thousands of years."
Oh I see, because all piracy is exactly the same and has never changed ever. Is that another of those libertarian simplifications where you simplify things down that would otherwise be far too confusing for you?
Japanese whaling is a real actual crime to most countries too given that it's not really about research, are you suggesting the law should only be applied arbitrarily to support your world view in international waters?
Why do you assume piracy involves murder, rape, and torture? There are plenty of cases of piracy simply involving seizure of assets - resources you might say - and leaving the people in life boats or the rest of the boat itself to be picked up. It's not an inherently violent crime, what sort of sick sociopathic person are you to fantasise about the worst like that?
"Dr. Daniel Pauly from the UBC Fisheries Centre states that fisheries are a gigantic Ponzi Scheme. We also don't even know what the pre-fishery populations were, so there is no initial baseline to base your advocacy on. To think we can change the krill biomass and put the ocean back into balance by modifying whale populations is rearranging deck chairs on the Hindenberg."
We don't need to know what they are and we don't need to "modify" whale populations, we just need to leave them the fuck alone and nature takes care of the rest, that's kind of the point.
Right but that anecdote is meaningless because what you're effectively saying is that you hired a shit developer. Mathematics isn't a replacement for software development it's a compliment, but if you're bad at software development it wont magically fix that, you've still got a shit developer however you cut it.
You know, it is possible to be good at maths, good at programming, good at software architecture, good at documentation, and even good at dealing with clients too right?
A good software developer, bad mathematician is no better or worse than a good mathematician, bad software developer, but both are bottom of the rung when compared against a good software developer, good mathematician - and yes, they exist and I'd wager that the numerous people here on Slashdot defending the importance of maths in software development is evidence of that, because they either are those people, or have encountered those people and have seen the difference it makes.
Slashdot Mirror
"You seem to fail to understand that there is no difference between designing a car and designing a software product.
All the things that go into designing a car should go into designing software. The fact that you don't do it that way shows the failure is you."
So you're saying that no bespoke software development should occur and end users should have no choice but to work with pre-packaged software whether it suits their needs or not?
Car manufacturing is a production line task based on a design determined by the experts and implemented as is. Bespoke software would, in contrast, be equivalent to each customer have the car designed as and how they want and each outcome looking and being completely different from the other such that they could not possibly be manufactured in a production line.
If you can't see the difference and don't understand the differences in the types of project then you're not qualified or experienced enough to be engaging in this discussion. What you say only holds true for pre-packaged software, which is a minority of the total development that is done across the globe.
Bespoke software development really is nothing like producing a car and anyone who thinks otherwise clearly has absolutely zero experience in actual delivery of bespoke software projects. I find it kind of ironic that you refer to engineering given that many engineering disciplines that do produce bespoke solutions suffer the same problems that software does and are in fact the source of some elements of agile in the first place. Certainly when I worked at an electromechanical engineering firm they had the exact same problems and solved them by moving to an agile process on a T&M charging basis.
In fact, even in the UK the NHS has made use of SCRUM in determining treatment methods for some illnesses because the duration of the project wasn't quantifiable beforehand and needed to be operated on a cost-controlled basis so that it could be axed if going beyond it's necessary goals.
So no, the GP isn't a problem. Understanding the way different types of project work isn't a problem in any way whatsoever - he does, but apparently you don't.
I think you're generalising now, to say good architecture is both draconian and something that the agile camp feigns away from is nonsense. Good architecture is neither draconian nor feigned away from, in fact, good architecture is central to agile - agile can only work if you work in a modular manner.
"but ultimately somebody needs to own the architecture, define the interfaces and make sure that it meets the non-functional requirements"
Yes, the technical architect. They'll be involved before the agile teams actually get into gear and get started and they'll have all those interfaces defined beforehand. Depending on whether you have one or more technical architects it's perfectly possible that the architecture phase is carried out as a sprint or a few sprints in itself before the developers even come along and start their sprints.
"Which is why the EU, just as any other governmentorial institution in this world, usually creates laws and decisions in favor of the big money, not the people."
Do you have any evidence of this? From what I've seen the EU seems to enact laws that are more in favour of the people than the laws enacted by the constituent governments of the member nations.
"And which is why a decision in favour of network neutrality, which would interfere with the profit maximization of the biggest European telcos, is improbable even if suggested by a top-rank commissioner. And if it really should become reality, it will be one of the rare exceptions to the rule."
Why do you think this? from laws on protecting natural woodland to laws limiting the charges mobile providers can charge when roaming through the EU to various human rights laws the EU has passed an awful lot of pro-citizen, anti-business laws.
The problem is that you seem to have assumed that your 15,000 lobbyists are all lobbying for big business, I don't think that's the case. Whilst there are a lot of big business lobbyists there the cost of lobbying the EP and EC is quite prohibitive due to it's relative size and broadness of languages and views such that corporate lobbying ends up being much less effective than it does at a national level.
In contrast, national groupings such as human rights charities and so forth tend to exist in every European nation and share the same goals, so it's easier for these to work together to lobby their respective national representatives in their native languages than it is for a company to do so. Having a few hundred staff on hand just for lobbying in the EU is going to rarely be worth it when you're out-lobbied by national groups with shared interests.
She's one of those rare politicians that has an actual clue.
How is that hypocritical and which idiots modded this up?
What has a historical national court ruling got to do with future EU wide law planning?
There's nothing hypocritical there because you have two distinct bodies going different ways.
A dutch court has absolutely zero control over or relevance to future European Parliament legislation. If the EU goes ahead with this the dutch court will have to comply once it's government implements the relevant legislation.
They're not just directly elected by the people either, they're directed through a form of proportional representation so they're actually more representative of the make up of each nation's vote than most national parliaments are.
Certainly the consistency and spread of EP representatives of the UK are much more representative of popular support than our national government is.
There doesn't need to be any orchestration between teams that's really the point of good modular software design - each team is in effect just developing it's own product, at worst you'll have a team that binds it altogether.
But normally, you'll have team 1 building a web service that exposes methods a, b and c with well defined parameters beforehand, you'll have team 2 building a DLL that utilises those methods and can build against a mock version of the service, team 3 that utilises the DLL but they can just use a placeholder DLL for development and so on and so forth.
It's your integration testing team that will put them together to find bugs and report back to whichever team they deem to be at fault to fix it as a bug request.
I'm not trying to be insulting but if you've got a scenario where teams are fighting each other over things then your architect has already failed to properly modularise the software and separate concerns, and that certainly isn't what I mean by a good architect. I agree there are some technologies and platforms where modularity becomes difficult to achieve (i.e. some embedded systems), but in those cases I think you're just treading into territory where agile may not be the best fit anyway. If you're developing something with say, SoA though then it's trivial to just hand different teams different services and tell them what interfaces they have to build against - that way the teams don't ever even need to speak to each other even, they could even be spread across the globe and speak completely different languages as long as they get their module built and built to the interface that has been specified.
With regards to Windows 8 I don't think it's necessarily an apt comparison because Windows 8 has genuine issues that are objectively problematic, for example, new user interface concepts such as moving over hot areas to be able to access settings/shut down the system but no visual cue as to that fact such that for a user they can be left with just absolutely no idea how to shut down their system. That is objectively just a massive usability failing and is an example of one of many genuine issues with Windows 8.
Agile isn't any one set of ideas of methodologies but a number of them but the overarching trait of them is that they support management of projects where there is a lot of potential for requirements to change and hence tend to revolve around not having requirements set in stone from the outset in a single big monolithic document.
It means different things to different people and there is no one true agile methodology, but there are methodologies within agile that are very firmly defined like SCRUM.
The person you spoke to is wrong in implying agile is always like that, there version of it obviously is but that doesn't mean agile is always like they suggest.
"Agile however is just (as other have pointed out) another way to say 'we just throw any crap code at the wall that anyone wants to make, and see what sticks'"
No it's not. It can be used like that and is used like that by retards but agile also encompasses an awful lot of good ideas and some methodologies like SCRUM as sometimes the exactly right tool for the job to get things done more efficiently and effectively.
Don't mistake people having no idea what they're doing failing miserably and when questioned they say "Oh erm, yeah, I er, yeah I think it's because agile is the problem" when really they mean "I'm fucking shit at my job, I screwed up royally but refuse to admit it" for agile being actually like that.
It's not something you discuss and it's not a show stopper. Simply saying at a meeting on the morning "Actually, it was a bit warm yesterday, can we get it cooler in here?" isn't something that needs immediate drop-everything attention at the time and is trivial enough to be dealt with the following morning.
Yes, if you suddenly get an out of the blue massive rise in temperatures for some odd reason then do something about that immediately, it's common sense, you need that, but don't go fucking around every 5 minutes over the slightest little thing or you'll never ever getting anything done.
If the mid-day and afternoon sun starts to heat the office up such that by 3pm one of the developers finds it too warm to concentrate it's still better than they battle on for the last hour or two than it is for them to go to the other 5 - 10 developers on the team and ask if they're hot too and if they want a fan also given that it's pretty well documented that each disruption results in 15 - 20mins lost productivity. Effectively you're losing at least about an hour and a half of productivity for one developer's problem. Much better that at the morning standup someone raises it, the question is asked who else wants a fan, and then it's dealt with simply and effectively with only 30 seconds of lost time rather than 75 to 150 minutes of lost time. These sorts of trivial things stack up and cause real problems.
No wonder you posted AC, I wouldn't want to be associated with the sorts of nonsense you posted either.
"but it does have its drawbacks especially in dealing with larger teams and larger problems."
Although I agree with everything else you've said, I don't really agree with this. Things like SCRUM work perfectly well with large teams and large problems, because all you do is have sets of SCRUM teams of 5 developers or whatever each working on separate modules.
What this does mean is that you need really good architects however that can design a solution in a nice loosely coupled component based modular manner, and it does mean you need people who have an overview of those modules and can coordinate any interop between them - the people who do this may themselves even be an agile SCRUM team of their own, or they may just be the original architect or architects by themselves, or even a technical project manager or two.
There's no inherent reason why agile can't be well suited to large projects though, on the contrary, the larger a project gets the harder it is to control it with waterfall (due to the inherently greater scope for change) so things like scrum become more effective.
"Well, originally the task of the people that are now calling themselves "Police" was to beat the subjects of the ruling class into submission whenever they developed independent ideas. Sometimes also just for fun."
Not true in the slightest in the UK. The British police force was developed under the idea of policing by consent, that the police can police only with the consent of the citizenship because the citizens want a force to deal with murder and so forth, but not to beat them down.
This isn't about going back to those old times, it's about moving away from the old times and the original ideology behind British policing, and that's the problem.
Well said, it's the same with agile in general - most developers including all too many on Slashdot don't like it because it forces accountability. Of course you're not going to like standup meetings because when it gets to explaining what you did yesterday, "I trolled Slashdot all day" doesn't exactly sound that useful.
Judging by many of the posts here from various posters over the years I'd wager another reason is that a lot of people can't just admit when they were wrong, they'll jump to extreme absurdities and start talking nonsense and make no sense rather than admit they were wrong. Agile doesn't support that mindset well, because it requires developers who can admit what they did wrong and talk about how they can improve and avoid similar issues in the future. It requires the developer to be capable of introspection - to look at themselves and see how they can improve. If you believe you're perfect and never wrong then you're never going to be good enough to do agile.
You do need competent accountable developers to make agile work, if you have half-arsed layabouts who are never wrong then you're fucked. You're fucked anyway of course, it's just that your existing methodologies like waterfall mask it, because they can troll Slashdot day in day out for a number of weeks before anyone questions what they're doing at which point they make up some lame ass excuse about how something was proving to be more difficult than they originally thought but that they're "almost there" and then implement the half day job in half a day before repeating the cycle.
Or in other words bad developers hate agile because it requires them to do what they're actually paid to do.
Sorry but the actual problem is you. You're not a team player, you're not an effective developer, it's that simple.
The point of the standup is to keep everyone abreast of who is doing what and what problems they encountered. The benefits of this are things such as:
1) If someone falls ill, everyone else knows where he was upto so someone can take over
2) Talk about problems can cause others to offer solutions, or if the problem was already solved, to share solutions so others don't encountered similar problems
3) Raising more general problems such as "It was too hot in here to concentrate yesterday" so that the product owner/SCRUM master can go do something about that, like buy some fans
4) Raise upcoming potential problems before they occur, so that developers can prepare and plan for them
5) Provides general greater knowledge transfer - the team is more informed.
Yes you can do all of these things ad-hoc, but you're going to absolutely obliterate your teams productivity because they never know when the next arbitrary interruption is come from and they'll never have any idea when they know they'll have a fixed block of uninterrupted time to crack on with a difficult problem without interruptions.
If your standups are rolling on for more than 5 - 15 mins then yes, you're doing it wrong. They should be timeboxed and if they carry over then your devs are going into too much detail - the point is to say "I'm having trouble with problem x, anyone encountered it?" and then two people say yes, they know how to solve it - great, talk to them after the standup about it. The standup is just a summary - detail comes after.
Getting people together does not also take time and is a non-issue, you do it at a fixed time, and if someone isn't there you start without them. If that's a problem you raise it there and then as a problem and the responsible person deals with it. It's really not difficult.
With regards to solving problems when they happen, yes, if you can do that do that, but don't just arbitrarily interrupt the whole dev team to ask if they know anything about it and ruin their concentration, either drop them an e-mail and wait for them to get back to you, figure it out yourself, or get on with something else for the time being.
I'm not surprised that agile doesn't work for you, as you have all the traits of a classic anti-social developer who can't function well in a team - you don't care what anyone else is doing because you have no intention of carrying on their work if something happens to them, I guess that's "someone else's problem", you only want to talk to other people when it suits you, you don't care about their concentration or focus on a problem, if you get stuck you want to interrupt them when it suits you. Agile isn't designed to help people like you as individuals, it's designed to mitigate the issues people like you cause, it's designed to make whole teams more effective and that's what it does.
If you don't want to work as an effective team member that's okay, but do your team a favour and go find a job where you can do exactly that - sit in your isolation chamber and not be bothered by anyone else and similarly, not bother anyone else. You're just not well placed to function in a team and that's the real underlying source of your complaints, not agile.
Um, that's kind of the point. It caters to that very fact of life, and you charge them for it.
To put in a rather simplified manner, the agile business model for clients should basically be that:
You give them a rough estimate of the time needed for their initial requirements by number of sprints, so it may be say, 20 2 week sprints with a sprint of 5 developers be charged at x rate. You produce a product backlog of all tasks at the start and prioritise them with the customer. You have a burndown chart that shows roughly what will be completed each sprint, this chart is a simple graph of feature completion against time so it is normally just a straight diagonal line starting at the top left (no features completed at start), and ending at the bottom right (all features completed at end).
At the end of each sprint you produce something from the set of features for that sprint and show it to the client, if they want to change or add anything you throw it on the product backlog and update the burndown chart. It may be that at this point that that changes and it now finishes past the original estimation point. That means the client can see the impact of the changes they requested and consider whether they really do want to pay for an extra sprint or whatever, or if they want to remove other features to still hit the deadline.
It controls cost and that's the point, it forces the client to consider the impact of any changes they request. The downside for some clients is that they can't abuse holes in specs and contracts to hold you by the balls to do additional work for free that you hadn't budgeted for (because all specs and contracts have holes, period.) but the upside for more honest clients and for the company doing development is that the client gets exactly what they pay for, no more, no less. They don't get ripped off, and they don't get to rip you off. Instead of paying for an arbitrary packaged product which can easily have overruns the client is paying to use your resources at some specific markup, hence why costs are controlled.
I'll be the last person to believe that agile is a silver bullet, I know full well that it's just another tool for the toolbox to be used when appropriate but it is rather tiresome to see all the people complain about it who are using it wrong, and then often say "People always just tell me I'm using it wrong, but it's not me it must be agile!" - bullshit, you ARE using it wrong. It's like a lot of developers haven't really learnt the whys, whens, and hows of agile and so make a complete hash up of trying to implement it then blame the tool. To give a programming analogy, it's like writing something in C/C++ without fully understanding pointers - you'll probably just about get something running, but it's going to be a buggy bloated, memory leak laden mess.
If you genuinely understand agile, and if you know when and how to use it, then it's a brilliant tool, but if you're a fucking idiot then you'll still be a fucking idiot even if you try and use agile.
Many of the comments modded up so here reflect that inherent lack of understanding, people are saying things that are just flat out wrong and don't make any sense if you actually have even a basic understanding of the point and use of agile.
I've used agile (SCRUM) and waterfall extensively to deliver projects and I don't pretend either is better than the other all of the time, but I know enough to know that most of what's said here about agile is bullshit born from inexperience and/or incompetence.
Still trying to redefine piracy I see. I guess you're just not that smart and can't admit when you're wrong.
Also, last I checked international waters are international waters, not national waters, hence they're bound by international law, which is what the IWC's whaling prohibition falls under, so I've no idea how you got so confused as to think my stance had changed.
I see you've still dodged the contradictions you created though. It never ceases to amaze me how people like you do that when it'd just be easier to admit you were wrong. I guess you just like digging holes.
"2. You're talking about acts of warfare or enacting executive decisions."
Wrong. Piracy:
1. The practice of attacking and robbing ships at sea.
2. A similar practice in other contexts, esp. hijacking.
There is nothing about piracy that prevents it being an action by state actors, it is simply the seizure or hijacking of ships, if that happens at the behest of a state it is still piracy, there's no getting away from that. You're desperately trying to avoid admitting that you're wrong by attempting to play on semantics, but it doesn't work, because you're attempting to redefine the term in your own manner. You are not grand dictator of the English language, that's not something you get to do.
This is why Ford called the seizure of the Mayaguez piracy, because it was.
"Your incorrect definition of libertrarianism aside"
There you go again, trying to redefine the English language rather than admitting you're wrong. Libertarianism at it's core is a belief of minimal intervention by governing bodies, and that's exactly what you're arguing should be the case at sea - that there are no laws (you're wrong on that) governing the harvesting of resources. It wouldn't be so bad if you could at least fucking spell libertarianism before pretending you know what it is when you clearly don't.
"the issue of international waters is that of consensus"
What "issue"? Certainly the harvesting of whales isn't, that's why the IWC exists and why it stirs so much debate every year. There's certainly no consensus that Japan's whaling falls under the research exemption, which is precisely why they're finding themselves in court.
"This has nothing to do with libertrarianism and everything to do with sovereignty."
There we go again, that conflict is back, yet you've still failed to explain your reasoning on it. If it's about sovereignty then again, why do you believe Japan's sovereignty deserves to be valued more highly than that of the US, Australia and New Zealand? It's okay for Japan to not be dictated to and farm whales at will but it's okay for Japan to tell the US, Australia and so forth "tough shit, we don't care about your whale tourism industry and we're going to kill them all for ourselves"?
"Otherwise you could for example claim that any people on a cruiser that is located in Saudi Arabian waters that have sex without marriage are performing adultery, and should be completely legally punished for it under Saudi Arabian laws."
Um, if they're in Saudi Arabian waters, that's exactly how it works - it's still classed as Saudi Arabian territory where Saudi laws apply. By your logic it'd be okay to commit murder inside say British waters and the government could do nothing. How do you think interception of drug smuggling works? They catch them when they enter territorial waters precisely because that territory's laws apply.
Why not just do the easy thing and admit you're way out of your depth and stop digging? It's pretty obvious you don't know what you're on about given your definition of piracy and libertarianism conflict with the established definitions and that your understanding of maritime law is completely wrong? If you are going to carry on digging then please, do me at least one favour, explain why you think Japan has a greater right to exploit resources in international water destructively than other nations do non-destructively? Explain to me why you feel Japan overrules other nations on natural resources in international waters, I'm still really intrigued to hear your justification because you seem pretty determined to keep up the contradiction rather than simply admit you didn't really think it through and oversimplified.
"Microsoft should hire Infoword's writers as design consultants. Inforworld's staff doesn't have the luxury of being out of touch with users."
Judging by the fact that what was really just a simple article when it comes too was presented as some kind of faux-slideshow that randomly went white in the middle with a link return to slideshow (I assume my ad blocker half-killed a popup ad) I'd say they're perfectly well out of touch with users too.
"1. Which court specifically? Did it have jurisdiction over international waters, or was this a local court of some nation that has no legal jurisdiction over international waters and applies local laws that again have no jurisdiction, not unlike applying laws forcing women to wear veil and be always escorted by male companion?"
Wait, hang on a second, now you're saying that there is jurisdiction over international waters? What happened to your international free for all view of that? Have you abandoned that now? It's the International Court of Justice though if you were wondering.
"2. Piracy is a well established act that has remained largely unchanged in forms of violence and outcome for victims for thousands of years until it was largely eliminated as a form of violence in last century."
You don't know much about piracy do you? You realise even where sovereign nations in the past have seized ships of other nations for political reasons without any intention of real actual harm to the crew that it's still classed as piracy right?
I notice you completely ignored my question regarding the blatant contradictions your first come first served ideology of a complete free for all in international waters brings. Don't worry, I don't expect you to admit you were wrong explicitly, but I'll take your silence and apparent inability to address those contradictions as an admittance on your behalf that maybe it isn't quite as simple as you made out and that maybe first come first served in terms of pillaging natural resources in international territory causes quite some complexities such that the best option really is just no one gets it unless there is some kind of consensus on the issue, which, with whaling, there isn't.
"I must admit I'm intrigued at being called a libertrarian, considering just how critical I am of that particular political line of thinking."
Yet that's exactly what you're suggesting should be the case in international waters - a survival of the fittest, deregulated, free for all. A libertarian dream. This means that you're either betraying your own views, you don't know what libertarianism actually is, or you're lying about your feelings on libertarianism.
You're still showing absolutely no sense of proportion, if you think the conditions of Guantanamo are even close to that of the Japanese (or German for that matter) concentration camps then no, you don't study history, in fact, you don't know the first thing about it.
I think what George Bush did was criminal, but to compare it to what the Japanese did in World War II is absolutely fucking insane. Even ignoring the concentration camp issue you can't pretend that the hundreds of thousands who died through sectarian violence as an indirect result of the war is the same as the millions who were killed as a direct order of the Japanese leadership - not only is the scale larger but one was an indirect side effect caused by Bush's stupidity and the other was a direct order caused by Japanese malice.
What's perhaps most interesting is when you see an overlaid map of bovine TB and UK badger populations. It demonstrates pretty clearly that there's no link between the two, in fact, some of the areas in the UK with low bovine TB have plenty of badgers, and there are many areas with bovine TB that have no badgers.
When you see a correlation it doesn't necessarily imply causality but it does provide you a starting point to look for causality, but the problem in this case is there's not even a correlation, not even close, so to make the jump to cry causation like the government and farming unions have is just absurd, it makes no sense.
The problem is I would guess entirely about biosecurity in the South West and West of England, the farmers have done such a poor job of it that TB has become so rife in their cattle that they now can't eradicate it. The government complains that they're paying millions in compensation to farmers so the cull is necessary - that's stupid, what's necessary is to stop paying them any compensation for a problem they've caused themselves so that those who practice poor biosecurity go out of business and the more competent farmers from elsewhere in the UK can take over their land and do it properly.
Here's the map in question:
http://www.deadofnightproductions.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/63572079_badgers_bovine_tb_464.gif
The obvious question is if badgers are responsible for the spread of bovine TB then why have all those TB incidences up in the North and East of England and Scotland not translated into greater spreads? This highlights that it's about biosecurity - when TB is found in these parts of the country the farmers are properly dealing with it.
But what's particularly interesting is that if you look at the maps of the 2001 foot and mouth outbreak and the map of CJD occurrences in cattle the maps are not too dissimilar though for these two there are greater incidences in the North of England. I'd wager that after these incidents the North of England's farms upped their game, whilst the Western and South Western farms did not. I'd be surprised if it's a coincidence that time and time again this same section of the country sees farm animal disease outbreaks, whilst other parts of the country do not - that is a correlation that you could begin to seek causation from, unlike the badger/TB link where there is not even correlation.
We do need to end the compensation culture for farmers though, I'd guess that's in part to blame - making it profitable to have disease outbreaks is just stupid.
"1. It's not a crime. Please cite evidence to it being a crime if you wish to persist in pushing this lie."
Why the fuck do you think it's gone to court genius? To determine if it has broken the law.
The problem with libertarians like yourself is that you're not too sharp when it comes to thinking things through, to you it's a simplistic "Whales are a resource, whoever harvests them first gets them" and that's great until you recognise that they're a resource to other countries too like the US, Australia, New Zealand and so forth when kept alive because they create a multi-million dollar tourist industry. For some obscure arbitrary and so far undefined reason though you thus far seem to have decided the rights of Japan outweighs the rights of other nations. Care to elaborate on why Japan gets priority in your mind over other nations in exploiting this resource? What makes Japan so special as to get priority over everyone else?
"2. Because these facts about piracy are well established by credible historians worldwide over period of several thousands of years."
Oh I see, because all piracy is exactly the same and has never changed ever. Is that another of those libertarian simplifications where you simplify things down that would otherwise be far too confusing for you?
Japanese whaling is a real actual crime to most countries too given that it's not really about research, are you suggesting the law should only be applied arbitrarily to support your world view in international waters?
Why do you assume piracy involves murder, rape, and torture? There are plenty of cases of piracy simply involving seizure of assets - resources you might say - and leaving the people in life boats or the rest of the boat itself to be picked up. It's not an inherently violent crime, what sort of sick sociopathic person are you to fantasise about the worst like that?
"Dr. Daniel Pauly from the UBC Fisheries Centre states that fisheries are a gigantic Ponzi Scheme. We also don't even know what the pre-fishery populations were, so there is no initial baseline to base your advocacy on. To think we can change the krill biomass and put the ocean back into balance by modifying whale populations is rearranging deck chairs on the Hindenberg."
We don't need to know what they are and we don't need to "modify" whale populations, we just need to leave them the fuck alone and nature takes care of the rest, that's kind of the point.
Right but that anecdote is meaningless because what you're effectively saying is that you hired a shit developer. Mathematics isn't a replacement for software development it's a compliment, but if you're bad at software development it wont magically fix that, you've still got a shit developer however you cut it.
You know, it is possible to be good at maths, good at programming, good at software architecture, good at documentation, and even good at dealing with clients too right?
A good software developer, bad mathematician is no better or worse than a good mathematician, bad software developer, but both are bottom of the rung when compared against a good software developer, good mathematician - and yes, they exist and I'd wager that the numerous people here on Slashdot defending the importance of maths in software development is evidence of that, because they either are those people, or have encountered those people and have seen the difference it makes.