Software Psychology

An Improved Agile Manifesto?

Nate sent me the following link. Take a peek because it’s hilarious.

Was this created to mock enterprise companies or to mock Agile? I can’t even tell.

I hate to admit it, but I think this ‘joke’ is sort of correct. If I had one complaint about Agile it is that it seems too naive at times. The idea seems to be that if you use an Agile methodology you’ll change your customer from being a “hostile-customer” to a “customer-ally” and thereby make your project more successful. My experience suggests this is true most of the time.

But if you fail in that regard, you’ll end up with a “still-hostile-customer” and not even your normal mound of paperwork and documentation needed to keep yourself out of court. In short, Agile usually succeeds but if it fails, it tends to make the failure even worse.

Physics and the Law of Lossy Requirements

This post over at The Eternal Universe is a physicist complaining about how he’s not seeking a computer science degree, yet he has to keep learning computer languages just to publish physics papers.

He should have read my previous post about the Law of Lossy Requirements. The cheapest way to capture all of the details of an algorithm is in code. English language specs never capture all the necessary details. So of course physics papers are often written in code.