Programmer’s Paradox

Agile processes have become the darling of the industry, and certainly there is good reason for this.  They do tend to facilitate communication and development practices that lead to better software.  However, paralleling the transition to agile is a more insidious transition: a push towards open office spaces.
The argument goes that open is good, because [...]

Being agile does not mean rigidly adhering to a system called Agile.  Being agile means adapting to the situation at hand, no matter how you choose to adapt.
That’s my take from Steve McConnell’s latest post and I completely agree with him.

“The urgent can drown out the important,” she said. “It’s great we did these urgent, expedient search indices, but what we really need to do is put them on the same page.”
- quote from Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience at Google.
Emphasis added is my own.  Replace search indices with any [...]

Divide and Conquer.
It was while reading the Thrift white paper, and seeing this line in the conclusion that the connection hit me:
Thrift has enabled Facebook to build scalable backend services efficiently by enabling engineers to divide and conquer.
That’s exactly the point of all the various agile methodologies: enable a team to divide up the project [...]

Eric Sink has an interesting blog post about an experience he went through in his career where his manager showed incredible trust in him and everything turned out well.  It’s a story I wish more managers would read, but those who are likely to discover it have already learned the lesson and those who could [...]