Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Sans maîtrise, la puissance n'est rien

Pardon my French : "Power is nothing without control" was a famous commercial catch phrase from a tire company.

It made me think of a project and agility methodologies.
How is that one translated in the IT world :
"Latest technologies is nothing without control of the technical debt."
Not very catchy but so true.

One example:
On this new project, designed to replace legacy systems, you take the latest technology stack, add some very knowledgeable developers.
But without using any XP principle or any dogmatic approach: no true unit tests, no true continuous integration , no knowledge sharing but in big lengthy meetings ( of course no pair programming or code review , uh what is that?).

Shake it and let it marinated for 2 years. Open it and you'll smell a very strong technical debt.

Nothing can be changed, because of the fear of breaking something .
Not mentioning the lost knowledge of why it was designed like that.

Forecast result : the developers play the job security becoming all Bob the developer's types, and your new top notch application is now really a mammoth application.

Back to Square one. Same player play again.

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