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newt | 15 years ago | on: What Killed Waterfall Could Kill Agile

In what way is chrome's development waterfall? http://adtmag.com/articles/2010/07/30/is-google-going-agile.... And firefox? http://www.developer.com/open/article.php/3860226/Mozilla-Fi...

Those were the first 2 that I googled. I'm sure that some of them are not agile, most likely by default - e.g. the older Microsoft ones, before MS or anyone else discovered agile. But honestly, all you are doing is throwing out names of popular programs without any idea if they are agile or not, and then claiming success on the ones that no-body refutes.

After that behaviour, the burden of proof is on you - back each one up with references or go away.

It would be interesting if you found major projects that evaluated both agile and waterfall and still chose waterfall or deliberately changed to a less agile process, instead of the other way. Rather than just software written before the people involved knew what agile was.

newt | 15 years ago | on: What Killed Waterfall Could Kill Agile

Because the customer has no freaking idea what the requirements are at the start of the project.

I disagree. to get a scrum project (or any project) going, you do need to have a vague idea of what you want (e.g. I want a website to sell my widgets online) and a few features for the next iteration (.e.g. List all the widgets. Take an order by email).

Scrum just says that you can inspect, adapt and iterate over that process.

newt | 15 years ago | on: What Killed Waterfall Could Kill Agile

Nice. What percentage unit test coverage do you generally get? How do you deal with regressions introduced by bug-fixes? With technical debt? With requirements change and scope creep?

How much refactoring do you do? How big a team does this approach scale to?

newt | 15 years ago | on: What Killed Waterfall Could Kill Agile

They happen in parallel. You can be working on feature B while someone else is drafting a spec for feature C, and feature A is with the tester already. meanwhile the wishlist (features F, G, to ZomgPonies) is going onto the backlog in vague outline form for use in future iterations.

meeting with the customer to figure out if they want an accounting system or a CMS

That's an exaggeration. You seen some vision of what broad need the software fills before you start, and an initial backlog of high-priority features to get you going.

newt | 15 years ago | on: What Killed Waterfall Could Kill Agile

And before you sneer at Waterfall, go build me a nuclear power station with Agile

That would be interesting. Scrum says that your team should get themselves an appropriate set of tools and processes for the task at hand, and iterate, then inspect and adapt.

For a mission-critical lives-on-the-line software system, I'd imagine that there would be a lot of simulation and testing before the production release. Do you see a problem with that?

newt | 15 years ago | on: What Killed Waterfall Could Kill Agile

Waterfall doesn't have multiple passes

the only way that it can not have multiple passes is if the program is thrown away after V1.0. Any successfully program will be maintained and extended.

newt | 15 years ago | on: Antimatter atoms produced and trapped at CERN

Isn't the annihilation supposed to cause an explosion?

It releases lots of energy proportional to the mass, yes, but one proton + one anti-proton annihilating at a time, it's a very small explosion. And they only had 38 anti-protons.

I believe that one of the the articles quotes one of the Physicists saying that it "wouldn't even warm up a cup of coffee"

Edit here you go:

Prof Rob Thompson, head of physics and astronomy at the University of Calgary, one of the 42 Alpha investigators, said: 'This is a major discovery. ... We've been able to trap about 38 atoms, which is an incredibly small amount, nothing like what we would need to power Star Trek's Starship Enterprise or even to heat a cup of coffee.'

newt | 15 years ago | on: ASP.NET MVC 3 Release Candidate

Winforms to WPF was about 20 years, and a sorely needed change.

Silverlight is iterating quite quickly, but then they have WPF to build on.

newt | 15 years ago | on: Things Economists Agree On

The statement "A minimum wage increases unemployment among young and unskilled workers." is probably true, but if maximizing employment is the only goal, then just pay them peanuts and abolish overheads like health and safety.

I'd say that maximizing employment is not the only goal.

newt | 15 years ago | on: Too Dumb to Fail?

Yes but no.

Outwitting other people gambling on the stockmarket is explicitly legal, expected even. Thieving from unguarded targets is not.

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