One year and eleven months ago I sat through five or six CMMI trainings. That quality effort has pretty much died. Today I sat through my first Agile training. Monday will be my second.
What new "process improvement" training will I be in next year?
Friday, March 21, 2008
CMMI, Agile, What's next?
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6 comments:
Funny that a development process created more than 10 years ago is now "new". :)
I find that odd as well. My theory in all development processes is, they don't really matter. If you group a bunch of really smart people together, they'll figure out the best way to work together.
In contrast, if you group a bunch of dumb asses together, call it Agile, CMMI, XP, Scrum, etc; they're all shit because of the dumb asses.
I agree. The quality of products produced by a group will be proportional to the abilities of the group. A development process will not unleash some magical results. Although, management would like to think so.
Agile covers that - most of the writing specifically notes that it works best with senior developers. Did you go to the agile areas in the wiki? Do a search - if you want to see some of the videos/resources that are floating around.
"works best with senior developers"
While I would agree with that, I'd also argue that with great developers no formal "development process" is needed. With that said there are only so many "great" developers. I would argue, based on salaries, the current supply of developers at any talent level is not sufficient.
"If you group a bunch of really smart people together, they'll figure out the best way to work together."
"The quality of products produced by a group will be proportional to the abilities of the group."
Given that there are a finite number of "really smart" people, I wonder if there is a way to be profitable with just average developers? Meaning, if your a business owner (one with an average ROE) and you want to produce a product, how do you do so with only a few smart people and mostly average people? Furthermore, how can a business repeat this process over and over again as fast as possible with given capital constraints?
You need some deterministic (not strict but business like) process for achieving your desired result. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this is a problem that has been faced before by business owners. :)
My point is, YES you guys are right - smart people make great software. Problem solved? Now how do you make the best possible software given that smart people are scare resource? (Even scarcer if your pay scales don't allow for top 5% engineers.) Without some method of organization, your going to have 1000 monkey's pounding away at 1000 keyboards. Guess what - your not going to end up with Shakespeare.
I have not watched it yet, but I just got this post on innovation at google emailed to me which maybe of interest to this group.
Mac - I got this post emailed to me by FeedBurner. I really love FeedBurner's email subscription option.
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