Venkat Subramaniam

The practices in this book are genuinely good and worth thinking about. The presentation format - essentially a long list of advice - could use some work.

Some good quotes:

Agile development uses feedback to make constant adjustments in a highly collaborative environment.

Software development doesn’t happen in a chart, an IDE, or a design tool; it happens in your head.

No plan survives contact with the enemy. - Helmuth von Moltke

As U.S. President Eisenhower said, “The plan is worthless. The planning is essential.”

You can’t freeze requirements any more than you can freeze markets, competition, learning, evolution, or growth.… (más)

There are several new-fangled models of software development out there, and most of the writing on them reads like the indoctrination materials of some weird cult. This is no different, a collection of aphorisms and anecdotes, many of them contradictory, all with a sort of blandly uplifting feel. In this case, the book consists of a series of slogans - "Invest in your Team!" ,"Criticize Ideas, Not People!", and so forth - which are expanded into short mini-chapters, each one ending with a brief section titled "What it feels like". This last section is a present-tense, second person statement about what the given slogan will do for you. At the end of "Invest in your team", you are informed that "It feels like everyone is getting smarter. The whole team is aware of new technology and starts pointing out how to apply it or points out pitfalls to watch for." When you've learned to "criticize ideas, not people", apparently "It feels comfortable when the team discusses the genuine merits and possible drawbacks of several candidate solutions." And, as a bonus, "You can reject solutions that have too many drawbacks without hurt feelings, and imperfect (but still better) solutions can be adopted without guilt."
Perhaps this begins to sound a bit famliar: this is the language of the self-help book, the motivational speaker. This is the bland, trance-inducing jargon of the management seminar, the stuff that is sufficiently content free as to offer no grounds for objection (you can't object to nothing) and simultaneously justify anything.
Agile development may well be a useful mode in which to operate, and some of it seems quite interesting, but I would feel a little better about it if the people advocating it weren't so, well, creepy.… (más)