I was listening to a presenter in a recorded session today refer to their project being "code complete". I did not expect any to refer to that term these days.
Coding never made sense to me as a milestone. I was on one of the first death march C++ projects ever, beginning in 1989. The previous couple of years were spent primarily developing in Lisp. Even with CFront, no debuggers, mangled names... or maybe especially because of these things, my preferred development style was to be unambitious about the results, and to work in small steps.
As a whole hubris had overcome the team. C++ would enable us to rule the world, the sooner the better. The intuition was to spend more time thinking and then coding. Compiling, etc. took too long, so should be avoided.
The problem is that "thinking in objects" is not nearly as productive as "speaking in objects". When you speak in objects, you have a dialog. You speak your intent into the editor and the objects you create respond right back, the sooner the better.
Today Phil Windley writes about a couple of projects still on that old beaten path. So that's three projects in one day I've come across.
I think Ward Cunningham said...
It's all talk until the tests run.
3 comments:
Less aphoristically:
Releasing a protoype when only 20% of the functionality is complete, was a significant predictor of both reduced defect-rate and increased productivity.
Trade-offs between
Productivity and Quality
in Selecting Software
Development Practices
The MacCormack paper can be found here.
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