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What XP Ought To Be Called (Score:1)
Re:What XP Ought To Be Called (Score:2, Informative)
They got the Linux kernel wrong, then, as "refactoring" should be called "throwing it all away and starting over from scratch every release" and "automated testing" should be "ask users to debug it for you and berate them for not reading the development mailing list religiously". :)
Lots of open source projects succeed because their leaders are exceedingly brilliant at project management without discipline. Lots more projects succeed because there's a point at which you can throw many, many warm bodies at
Re:What XP Ought To Be Called (Score:1)
1) workers aren't forced to work on the boss's bad ideas -- the bad ideas
have to attract the workers on their own (see apache.org java stuff
2) no boss deadline pressure
3) no boss backward-compatibility pressure
These three things are, in my experience, responsible for the bulk of stupidity
in boss-run proprietary software organizations.
Now, of course,
Re:What XP Ought To Be Called (Score:3, Interesting)
But how can you say the Perl 5 guts don't have backward-compatibility pressure? :)
J. David works really hard, has a passion for writing good software, and knows many of the world's best Perl programmers
Re:What XP Ought To Be Called (Score:2, Insightful)
a proprietary shop, where the boss says "We can't lose this big account -- so
don't change anything, anywhere, that might cause them problems."
One of the reasons that proprietary software sucks in general is that the
programmers are first rushed, then told not to change anything. Developers of
free software have much more freedom to say "The next major version will change
things; stick with the old version if you want; fork the project if you want."
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Re:What XP Ought To Be Called (Score:1)
Right, open source software is less affected by economic pressure. That's probably the largest pressure that leads to an immature release, but it's not the only one.
(Sidebar: This weekend, Ward Cunningham and I discussed the idea that open source's biggest advantage is not necessarily improved communication, it's scalability in the sense that a thousand hackers can throw themselves at a problem and a few might eventually come up with a solution. I'll continue to argue that practicing a little m
Re:What XP Ought To Be Called (Score:1)
involved. It takes only a few really good ones to solve a particular problem.
And those really good hackers produce much better work when they have control.
In my experience it is proprietary shops that use the "hordes of programmers"
approach, trying to crank out software quickly by throwing lots of mediocre
programmers at the problem. The "wizard in the tower" approach, though
sometimes slower, gets better results.
Now, one could