Good news everyone! My magnum opus on Scrum just dropped, clocking in at almost 9K words! Prepare a drink, strap yourselves in, and enter the Torment Nexus.
https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/tossed-salads-and-scrumbled-eggs/
@ludicity Highly enjoyable read until I read this #FacePalm, "I like the principles enough that our consultancy is current leaning heavily towards adopting Extreme Programming practices." You're heading away from silly nouns toward cutesy acronyms, again with very little supporting evidence behind them.
A good book on exploring process is Applied Software Measurement by Capers Jones to see how much choice is based upon type of development and size of project.
@lwriemen I am skipping this with some friends now, and I must confess that it is vibing 0%. The whole book seems to be some sort of sales pitch for convincing businesses that they can't work if they don't buy training on Function Points, and Capers Jones is now my ultimate archnemesis.
@ludicity Well...you're going down the path of XP, which I'm sure would want to avoid measurement like the plague. You'll probably make your money; ignorance is very popular in software these days. "Perfection is the enemy of good!"
@ludicity That was probably a bit out of line, because I don't know anything about your line of work. XP might work for you. However, your dismissal of data as simply a sales pitch, says, "TL;DR. I'd rather remain ignorant." You can claim, "sales pitch", for any author of software development that has both book and company, e.g., Kent Beck, and it would sound just as ignorant.
@lwriemen I'm not taking the comment about how we'll do well with XP by essentially scamming with poorly-measured work personally, but it's definitely an intense take.
And re: Jones, it's not like I refuse to read hard books, I just really think functional points are weird and ineffective so far. I might read more later and do a writeup.
@ludicity Hmmm. Didn't mean for it to sound like you'd be scamming anyone. Sorry. The XPers tend to be my polar opposite on the best way to do software. I believe Shlaer and Mellor had the best approach, but without measurement, it's all just opinion. Plus if one proponent is doing web development and the other is doing embedded systems, then it becomes a useless discussion.
@lwriemen No worries, all water under the bridge.
I think I broadly agree, but don't actually mind it being just opinion. Coming from a psychology background, I don't have trouble deciding to just not measure things that I think can't be measured well anyway, which psych is very guilt of.
Subjectively, most engineers can tell you what helps them ship, and everything else is less important than that. I like XP so far, but partially that's because it has aesthetic qualities that motivate me.
@lwriemen I dunno, evidence in every domain seems like it's for nerds. We just know some programmers that inspire us, who have very successful businesses in a similar space, that swear by Extreme Programming.
The dominating factor is that our team is very strong, so the details mostly don't matter. The main selling point of XP is that I enjoy what I've read of Kent Beck's work. There are probably many other configurations that work, but quality of material in the space is important.