from Dave (Smalltalk) Thomas (dave@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
)
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I've been tied up and just had the chance to scan the posts and I
don't have the benefit of the full discussion hence I'll confine my
reply to Scrum. Scrum is a simple set of work practices (planning
meeting, stand up meeting, retrospective meeting) that allows a small
group of people (5 - 12) to
triage their to do list of work items working in collaboration with a
customer (or their surrogate). Scrum originated at Toyata. Software
Scrum added things like the Velocity Game (which is really the XP
Planning Game, aka Planning Poker itself a variant of Wide Band
Delphi). It stresses divide and counter and the proven benefits of
fixed time boxes called sprints. It emphasizes well known concepts of
incremental progress and of doing the most important thing first
(triage). Scrum isn't about programming per se it is a set of
practices for working together. One of the challenges of introducing
scrum is interactions with individual developers who prefer to be left
alone for long periods of time. A second challenge is the granularity
of the work as APL allows one to complete an entire story or
application in the time frame that one might define a few classes and
methods in an industrial OO application. Naive agilisita, will claim
that Scrum solves all problems, but it is really just a set of work
practices which encourage constant incremental progress.
There is a lot of interest and concern in the Agile community at the
quality and readability of Code. eg. Bob Martin's book and talks on
Clean Code, Beautiful Code, Pete Breen's book etc. There has beem much
recent interest in the craft of programming. Unfortunately the reality
is that working with hug wads of C++ and Java makes it a challenge to
polish (refactor) one's code when compared to APL, Scheme, Smalltalk,
Python or Ruby. In the end Klocs still kill and most everyone with a
post modern programming experience agrees that there is just too much
code which doesn't do very much using popular industrial languages.
There are lots of people in the industrial language community who
share your concern about Literate Programs but many more who simply
don't care, don't have time etc This isn't confined to the OO
community.
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