On 8/18/05, Francois Paul
<francois-VKbYeNyhmt9BDgjK7y7TUQ@public.gmane.org>
wrote:> Joel has blasted x-programming in his latest posting,
>
> http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/AardvarkSpec.html
>
> Maybe he should move from ASP.NET to Rails and actually give it a go.
>
> I''m not saying there should be no design up front, but depending
on the app it surely can be of great help to get as much code out as soon as
possible rather than writing endless specs.
>
> I used to plan everything up front, until I realised that for the past
couple months I was planning a spec for a app I am writing for myself and
instead of the problem becomming clearer the app morphed into something much
bigger and more complicated than I intended to have when I started. I''m
not saying that I didn''t come up with a couple of great ideas that I
most definately will be adding to the original idea, but I did waste some
valuable coding time, and I would probably eventually have added the other
features as the project grew naturally.
>
> Anyway, I threw away the spec, installed Rails, bought the THE BETA BOOK
(best investment ever, Thanks Dave!), and started spewing code.
> I find that with Ruby on Rails I can generally add new features almost as
fast as I would take to spec them.
>
> as far as I''m conserned there is really no comparison between
Agile Development with Ruby on Rails and BDUF and then starting to code in PHP
or ASP.
>
> I can get something that works up and running (and add features as I go)
where in the past I''d still be planning the app for days.
>
> I can''t see how a corporate development team using BDUF can hope
to compete against a small band of railers using Agile development.
>
> How much planning do you do before firing up your editor?
>
>
> :Francois
I don''t think Copilot is a web app, so using Rails may not help him.
Plus, there''s one fundamental point of XP and agile programming that
he''s missing: do the simplest thing that could possibly work.
-----------
When I wrote the first draft of this spec, I had a more complicated
flowchart that assumed that either party (helper or victim) could
initiate the process. This became extremely complicated and convoluted
for various reasons. As I worked through the screens that would be
needed to allow either party to initiate the process, I realized that
Aardvark would be just as useful, and radically simpler, if the helper
was required to start the whole process. Making this change in the
spec took an hour or two. If we had made this change in code, it would
have added weeks to the schedule.
-----------
--
rick
http://techno-weenie.net