Remote Island

The cartoon strip ‘Dilbert’ never fails to amuse me. Scott Adams has just started a series about the PHB employing a more senior member of staff, and continues to patronise him not understanding that he is bringing a great deal of experience into the team. Today’s strip was typical, “Mature Employee – I was a chip designer in my old job. PHB – Really? Chocolate or Poker?”. This isn’t far from the truth in organisations today from what I’ve read on the ‘net lately. On the BBC News website a week or two back, there was a piece about the impending doom or crisis for the UK IT job market. It seems that we don’t have enough skilled people out there to fill the vacant positions. But reading many comments on the message boards that accompanied news article, it appears that ageism is prevalent throughout the UK IT industry.

An interesting and funny article/rant about the Agile methodology and the development process at Google. The first paragraph about the ‘Bad Kind’ made me laugh out loud (can’t think why), and the quote about pair programming made me nod a few times - I’ve known companies who feel they need to practice pair programming religiously to resolve spiraling defect counts and/or improve the quality of their code.

From my own experience, I’ve come to learn that Agile doesn’t always solve all your software development problems and a lot of XP techniques are a little unnecessary - probably because they aren’t executed correctly, or misunderstood. Take the good bits from Agile, the ones that promote productivity, and run with them.

Link to Article [steve-yegge.blogspot.com].