Programming like Kent Beck | Hacker News Reader

Programming like Kent Beck

blog.iterate.no

85 pointssimenfur7 comments

Its refreshing to see that he focuses on integration testing. Most programmers I know understand that in any kind of engineering every decision is a tradeoff. So testing every line of code means you are trading off speed and flexibility for very little gain in some cases (80/20?). XP introduced the idea that there isn't a tradeoff. You take things to the extreme. So as a methodology its not a good one to follow. But as a force it was absolutely beneficial. There were plenty of moderates arguing against the whole waterfall thing for years and getting nowhere. XP recognised (conciously or not, I don't know) that the zealots who enforced waterfall weren't the brighest so there was no point in putting subtle arguments to them. They would only move to something that was a bit boneheaded. And so XP as a force actually managed to move a lot of the industry more twoards the centre.

http://leanpub.com/leprechauns

In the downloadable sample there is a nice analysis which refutes the "zealots who enforced weren't the brightest".

In the short: there were no zealots. Nothing was enforced, the term "waterfall" comes up much later and it was meant as being iterative from the beginning.

So one might ask: how come that this folklore is being trumpeted all around like a truth?

I know that waterfall was originally meant to be iterative. What I meant by "the whole waterfall thing" was the practice of it in industry. And by "zealots who enforced weren't the brightest", I meant mainly management in enterprise development who arent' bright enough to understand what development is and so want to treat it as a repeatable process like manufacturing which is much easier to 'manage' than any kind of creative process.

Each hype needs a straw-man. At least, when someone criticizes 'Waterfall' and praises 'Agile' you know s/he is clueless.

wasn't beck the person who couldn't solve some basic problem recently? it was mentioned here. [google...] ok, here it is - re-formatting some text (in a very basic way - just clipping lines) - http://blog.8thlight.com/uncle-bob/2012/04/20/Why-Is-Estimat... the hn discussion is at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3880522

(not sure what my points is; the article here seems quite reasonable - very good advice, in fact, imho. i guess it just stuck in my mind as being so odd.)

Yes, that was me. I get stuck sometimes. In this case the key insight is that the recursive algorithm is much easier to get to work than the iterative one. There was also the added complexity of two mammoth egos attempting to collaborate.

thank-you for removing the dissonance there (and i am so glad i added that disclaimer ;o)

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