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On 8/24/2011 9:43 AM, john e wrote:
So it's the realisation that you really can't develop (business!)
software using a strict process, with up-front planning and
requirements gathering. A much better way is to be more "iterative",
where you "grow" software, instead of building it (like a house or a
car).

I disagree ... I don't think you can develop software WITHOUT long term planning, requirements gathering, etc.

Any software release has to have a goal and an over arching plan.

How you implement that plan can be iterative.

The most important thing doing "agile" is constant refactoring your
software to keep it "healthy", so you can easily change it and add
new functionality, also 5 years from now.

The problem with constant refactoring is that you are constantly throwing a stable code base into flux ... thereby requiring in-depth regression testing of code that was (probably) previously working.

It's much easier to do ongoing refactoring if your code was designed in a way to support it (highly modularized, well documented, functionally isolated, etc). But how many people here work on a system that was designed with that in mind? I've got objects on my system that were last compiled in 1989 ... they work, but they aren't the most elegant bits of code in the world. I would LOVE to refactor some of those pieces of code using modern techniques. But to do so would require that I refactor how that code is invoked, and the whole things explodes from there.

Agile also emphasizes automated unit testing ... which I'm highly in favor of ... but again, this is something your code base must be designed to support. This gets even more complex when you have external integrations are involved. Automated unit testing works great if you can completely control all aspects of the system input's ... but when you have an external system that provides some input, it's harder to automate that part.

david


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