Dan Waters
dwaters at usinternet.com
Thu Aug 18 07:01:55 CDT 2005
I agree wholeheartedly with Joel. I developed a spec where instead of the Quality Dept. initiating a record, it was initiated by the Purchasing Dept. because they were the first group to become aware of the issue. I wouldn't have known that without investigating and understanding up front what the whole process was. The Purchasing Dept. agreed pretty quickly that they could do this, particularly because having a software application to use instead of paper forms made it easy. The Quality Dept. was initiating because everyone assumed that it was a Quality process. That was departmental thinking - it's whole company process thinking that really works. Dan Waters -----Original Message----- From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com [mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Shamil Salakhetdinov Sent: Thursday, August 18, 2005 4:50 AM To: !DBA-MAIN Subject: [AccessD] OT(?): Big Design Up Front (BDUF) vs. XP any comments,ideas, experience? Hi All, I've got this this today from JoelOnSoftware subscription list: <<<<<< "As I worked through the screens that would be needed to allow either party to initiate the process, I realized that Aardvark would be just as useful, and radically simpler, if the helper was required to start the whole process. Making this change in the spec took an hour or two. If we had made this change in code, it would have added weeks to the schedule. I can't tell you how strongly I believe in Big Design Up Front, which the proponents of Extreme Programming consider anathema. I have consistently saved time and made better products by using BDUF and I'm proud to use it, no matter what the XP fanatics claim. They're just wrong on this point and I can't be any clearer than that." - From my latest article: The Project Aardvark Spec http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/AardvarkSpec.html >>>>> No comments. It happened that I'm currently reading: "Microsoft Object Thinking" by David West ISBN:0735619654 Microsoft Press C 2004 and "Extreme Programming Adventures in C# " by Ron Jeffries ISBN:0735619492 Microsoft Press C 2004 These two books are from Microsoft Press and they have a lot of useful information on eXterme Programming, Unit Testing and Classical(Behavioral) vs. currently existing in most implementations "real life" UML-based(RUP) OOD&P. When MS Press publishes books on such more computer-science than used in real life projects subjects then they are very probably "cultivating the ground" for the soon to become true "dreams". (I remember I watched a movie "Microsoft, Year 2004"(form MS of course) somewhere in year 1995 or so - and as I see now their by that time science-fiction is now real-life, exactly in year 2004-2005. I must say I impressed with both books (and there are just a few technical books I liked because most of them are just "chewing" MSDN or other docs without almost any new ideas). The more I read them the more I like them and I see a lot of sense in what is written in them and I see a lot of my own ideas and experience are there too. I'm glad my thinking is in the mainstream (of course what they say is much more elaborated and thought through and based on their own rich experience). So my guess/thinking is that XP, Unit Testing and Behavioral (Extreme) OOD&P are becoming mainstream for real-life development of the projects of any size - in fact as authors of these books state (based on their experience) that the stuff they are writing about is the "only" agile way to solve the challenges of nowadays customers and projects requests. And they are not fanatics I think - they base their writing on deep analysis of all the previous 50 years experience in software development and not only in software - "Microsoft Object Thinking" is more philosophical than technical book and it has quotes from Plato (year 400 B.C.) - these quotes are used to explain how to "attack" complicated/vague projects' requirements... What do you think about the subject and related issues? Do we need Access/VBA Unit Testing added here - http://opensourcetesting.org/unit_misc.php (Open source tools for software testing professionals) - it can be done - does it make sense? Shamil -- AccessD mailing list AccessD at databaseadvisors.com http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/accessd Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com