Development Central

Jeremy Miller’s MSDN article on Incremental Delivery Through Continuous Design makes a number of implicit assumptions. I wouldn’t have noticed these before, but my former manager’s healthy skepticism is starting to rub off on me. (Thanks Bob!) ;-)

Here are the ones I caught:

• Teams are made up of experienced Agile developers (or developers are mentored)
• Developers are disciplined
• Management is supportive
• Iterative development is appropriate to the project
• An Object Relational Mapping framework is not “infrastructure” but is a “given”

The last one is particularly blatant. Please note that I’m a huge fan of Agile, particularly XP. But an O/RM is infrastructure. As always, an organization needs to evaluate build vs. buy (vs. use open source). Depending on your platform and choice of language, that decision isn’t always clear-cut.

“Successful agile projects require far more discipline than any other methodology I’ve ever used.” - Brad Wilson