Re: The Promise of Forth

On Mar 27, 12:28 pm, JK <jk.use...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> One of the precepts of many "agile" methodologies is "constant
> refactoring" -- anyone who sees a need to refactor can and should
> do it.  Code is owned by the team, not by the individual. There
> are conditions, of course: any refactoring must preserve correct
> behavior as reified in a comprehensive collection of automated
> tests.

> I have employed such methods on smallish projects (3 or 4
> programmers), and it seems to work well.  The hardest part,
> really, is making sure the test cases cover the required functionality
> adequately.  I'm not sure how it would go with larger projects,
> although there are a lot of success stories out there for agile
> methods on fairly large projects (which I can't be bothered
> to go look for right now :-)

I'd expect it would tend to fall down as a flat system around the rule
of seven point ... at around 7 +/- 2 programmers (depending on how
well they work together). The basic problems, after all, are the same
as in getting people to proceed on the basis of an informal social
contract in an any committee / workgroup setting.

To scale it past that would seem likely to be the same solution as
when a workgroup has more tasks than 7 +/- 2 people can cope with, of
breaking into subgroups with specific remits for each subgroup. The
test cases that have to be met by each component a subgroup is
responsible for would be the core of the social contract each subgroup
is meeting, and so periodically there has to be a review process of
checking whether something needs to be added to the test cases ... or
even better, dropped from the test cases.