undefined | Better HN

0 pointseesmith4y ago0 comments

Your characterization is not true. The reality was quite the opposite.

Here's the introduction of Steve McConnell's "Rapid Development" from 1994 - well before the Agile Manifesto! - Chapter 1, page 1:

> The product manager told me he wanted to build a product right for a change. He wanted to pay attention to quality, prevent feature creep, control the schedule, and have a predictable ship date.

> When the time came to actually do the project, it became clear tha getting the product to market quickly was the only real priority. Usability? We don't have time. Performance? It can wait. Maintainability? Next project. Testing? Our users want the product now. Just get it out the door.

> This particular product manager wasn't the manager on just one product. He could have been almost any product manager I've worked for. This pattern is repeated day after day, state by state, all across the country. ...

This is as far from building a bridge as you can get. The next page of the book starts:

> [1.1] What is Rapid Development?

> To some people, rapid development consists of the application of a single pet tool or method. To the hacker, rapid development is coding for 36 hours at a stretch. To the information engineer, it's RAD - a combination of CASE tools, intensive user involvement, and tight timeboxes. To the vertical-market programmer, it's rapid prototyping using the latest version of Microsoft Visual Basic or Delphi. To the manager desperate to shorten a schedule, it's whatever practice was highlighted in the most recent issue of Business Week.

Agile drew from earlier methods ("intensive user involvement", "rapid prototyping") which were pretty common even before Agile.

0 comments

CRConrad4y ago

> Steve McConnell's "Rapid Development" from 1994 - well before the Agile Manifesto!

> > To the vertical-market programmer, it's rapid prototyping using the latest version of Microsoft Visual Basic or Delphi.

Huh? Did you get the year wrong, or was he referring to a brand-new / not yet released / tool as a "standard" for some segment of his audience? AFAICR, Delphi was introduced in 1995, or at the very earliest, late 1994. Feels weird that he should mention it in a book published in 1994.

mytailorisrich4y ago

The 'standard' method is the waterfall model, which proceeds like you would for a bridge (of course this is just an approximate analogy) from specs, to architecture, detailed specs, implementation, and tests.

Of course the shortcomings of this model have been known for a long time to anyone building software and so a number of other models appeared.

eesmithOP4y ago

What does "standard" mean to you?

From what I can tell, that assertion is common in Agile advocacy.

But from my experience as a professional software developer in the 1990s, and from reading stories about software development, waterfall was not used at Apple, Be, Commodore, Data General, Infocom, Microsoft, VisiCorp, and more.

That's not to say no one used a (modified) waterfall model. Simply that I haven't found evidence that it's meaningful to say it was the standard development model. [1]

[1] Technically, DOD-STD-2167A's apparent bias towards waterfall was a "standard", but I don't think that's what most people mean in this context, and in any case it was replaced by MIL-STD-498 in 1994, well before the Agile Manifesto.

mytailorisrich4y ago

I put 'standard' in quotes and meant that it (and its derivatives) was widespread. I'm sure not all companies used it, perhaps it also varied by domain. My experience is that it was indeed common, and still somewhat is. I read at my first job 20 years ago we had to take a training on the V model, which is derived from the waterfall model. It has also always been common in my experience to write plenty of detailed specs before writing any code, for instance.

I don't see much value in debating this. It seems clear to me that the people who wrote the Agile manifesto have experience in working in such, or similar environment and reacted to change it. And clearly that way of working was widespread enough and enough of a pain point to strike a cord. Certainly, when I first read the manifesto it struck a cord and I understood exactly where they were coming from. I think it is spot on.

1 more reply

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

0 pointseesmith4y ago0 comments

Your characterization is not true. The reality was quite the opposite.

Here's the introduction of Steve McConnell's "Rapid Development" from 1994 - well before the Agile Manifesto! - Chapter 1, page 1:

> The product manager told me he wanted to build a product right for a change. He wanted to pay attention to quality, prevent feature creep, control the schedule, and have a predictable ship date.

This is as far from building a bridge as you can get. The next page of the book starts:

> [1.1] What is Rapid Development?

Agile drew from earlier methods ("intensive user involvement", "rapid prototyping") which were pretty common even before Agile.

0 comments

CRConrad4y ago

> Steve McConnell's "Rapid Development" from 1994 - well before the Agile Manifesto!

> > To the vertical-market programmer, it's rapid prototyping using the latest version of Microsoft Visual Basic or Delphi.

mytailorisrich4y ago

Of course the shortcomings of this model have been known for a long time to anyone building software and so a number of other models appeared.

eesmithOP4y ago

What does "standard" mean to you?

From what I can tell, that assertion is common in Agile advocacy.

That's not to say no one used a (modified) waterfall model. Simply that I haven't found evidence that it's meaningful to say it was the standard development model. [1]

mytailorisrich4y ago

1 more reply

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse