Re: XP Stories (was: Re Second Dimension ...)

From: Universe (universe_at_tAkEcovadOuT.net)
Date: 03/23/04 

Date: Mon, 22 Mar 2004 22:52:18 -0500

"Jeff Grigg" <jgrigg@mo.net> wrote in message

> JXStern <JXSternChangeX2R@gte.net> wrote...
> > My problem is with those "customers" who are very certain,
> > and dead wrong about, well, anything and everything.
>
> If the business people we're working for can't figure out what
> business priorities they should have, and can't make any good business
> decisions, then they'll have problems far beyond anything a software
> development methodology can fix.

> At some point, we have to trust the business people to know how to run
> their business. That's what they were hired for. If they can't do
> that, they *should* be fired. (A business that ignores that issue for
> too long will get "fired" by the marketplace.) If they need help,
> there's a good tradition of doing business consulting. (It's one kind
> of job I do.) But business consulting is not software development;
> it's business consulting.

> In return, we should expect the business people to trust us to know
> how to develop business process automation (software). That's our
> specialty, and what we've been hired for. If they can't trust us to
> develop software, then they should fire us. (Or learn to trust a
> specialist to know how to do their job.) When I hire a plumber,
> roofer or electrician, I may monitor and verify their work, but I
> don't tell them how to do it.

All that sounds great but in actuality XP proposes an incorrect
method like the following:

"These XP'ers rather than place the big picture resulting from holistic
analysis in the lead, prefer to do their own analysis primarily by
relying on one user representative they would have present at all times.

In other words instead of relying on analysis professional experts who
establish all manner of contacts with all manner of staff involved with
the project the XP'ers want to get blood out of the stone of one user
representative.

There is no way for the typical project in a 3-5,000 person organization
to fully elicit all use cases and do at least minimal overall of at least
all key use cases before determining an overall system design architecture
with one user representative."

Even with release planning, if especially the key user stories have not been
studied in at least a minimal overall way the proper basis has not been
set for making the best release planning decisions. And that applies
to both the business and software technical perspectives.

The client does not have the best information to decide priorities and
developers do not have the best information for taking client desires and
making tradeoffs amongst economy, efficiency, speed and to specify that
X user story should be created before set Y user stories and then Z user
story should be built after that.

Ignoring that beyond at best a loose "metaphor", XP does not have a firm
and solid structural design plan for the system that would help to
reify many of these decisions and obviate the need to revisit certain
ones time and again as IID proceeds.

Elliott 

--
"Subject-oriented programming allows a software designer to avoid the
problems of indirection/confusion, preplanning, prohibition of OO
programming, and hierarchy hardening inherent in use of the Visitor
pattern....
    A comprehensive example of the use of Subject-oriented
programming to solve this sort of problem can be found in a Software
Engineering Environment Example."
             ~ http://www.research.ibm.com/sop/sopcvisp.htm]

Relevant Pages

  • Re: ASP, ASP.net, and C#
    ... designs and technical design documents to address business needs. ... systems analysis and programming in an internet environment. ... Ability to handle several tasks ...
    (microsoft.public.dotnet.languages.csharp)
  • RE: ASP, ASP.net, and C#
    ... Recursion: see Recursion ... designs and technical design documents to address business needs. ... systems analysis and programming in an internet environment. ...
    (microsoft.public.dotnet.languages.csharp)
  • Full Time Director Opening
    ... Candidate must have 10 yrs AS/400 management experience and must have ... development managers to plan for and maintain quality control over ... programming changes made to our production environments. ... Business Team associates. ...
    (comp.sys.ibm.as400.misc)
  • Full Time Director Opening
    ... Candidate must have 10 yrs AS/400 management experience and must have ... development managers to plan for and maintain quality control over ... programming changes made to our production environments. ... Business Team associates. ...
    (comp.sys.ibm.as400.misc)
  • Re: WWW/Internet 2009: 2nd CFP until 21 September x
    ... If you can decompose the table into multiple tables each of which has no nulls, what you discover is that a null in the combined table corresponds to an absent row in one of the decomposed tables. ... If I knew then what I know now, I would have refused the whole business and gone into a sensible line of work. ... At one time, maybe it was when Dijkstra was active and 'The Psychology of Computer Programming' was a current book, this culture was evident amond C programmers. ... I have some sympathy for Walt's comments on the grounds that I thought more than half of the apps I saw wouldn't have been needed in those businesses if I had been signing the cheques, let alone most of the requirements. ...
    (comp.databases.theory)