RE: Agile Development, Anyone?

Joe,

What better way to clone an expert than having him sit down and work with someone less experienced? Or two experts in different domains cross training each other?

If you're doing space shuttle programming maybe the quality of the work output is more important than the volume? I had a friend from college who ended up in Houston on that work. Two entirely separate groups programming two different Shuttle controllers for the same task so that a programming bug in one group might not be duplicated on both controllers. Five controllers (four from one team for hardware redundancy) on the shuttle have to come to an agreement for a task (a shuttle roll, etc) to get accomplished.

It's all up to your team if pairs programming is worthwhile or not.

Paul Morgan

Principal Programmer Analyst
IT Supply Chain/Replenishment


-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Joe Pluta
Sent: Monday, August 29, 2011 11:47 AM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: Re: Agile Development, Anyone?

On 8/29/2011 9:09 AM, David Gibbs wrote:

On 8/25/2011 11:57 AM, Buck wrote:

On 8/24/2011 5:46 PM, Sam_L wrote: I am a lifelong RPG programmer -
33 years and a bit - and I think that the agile philosophies have
much to offer me. My colleagues and management don't necessarily
share that view which constrains my ability to adapt particular
methodologies like pair programming. If I could though, I'd
definitely prefer a more agile group.

This is the biggest impediment to Agile / Scrum adoption ... it's a MAJOR change. You have to change the way you THINK.

And some of it frankly makes me shudder. Pair programming in particular
is a concept that could be as damaging as it is helpful. Two people
doing one job? Just to break even you have to finish the job in half
the clock time with the same number of errors. Fewer errors is
certainly good, but enough to make up for an additional worker? I doubt
you get that sort of improvement for your best developers.

Personally, I think pair programming is probably much better for new
programmers than for experts. And I think other agile concepts are
probably the same: they make sense in some situations and not in others.

Joe