[LRUG] Development methodologies (Was: Code samples: To do or not to do)

Chris Parsons chris at edendevelopment.co.uk
Wed Apr 8 04:32:00 PDT 2009


On 8 Apr 2009, at 12:17, Matthew Westcott wrote:

> Sure, Agile / XP and friends are primarily about business processes,  
> but I wouldn't say that they replace the need for good computer  
> science practices - rather, they place expectations on the  
> development process that are reasonable *if* you're following those  
> practices. Not working to a fixed up-front spec means that you have  
> to be good at refactoring, which means extracting patterns,  
> encapsulation, loosely-coupled components, effective use of the  
> right data structures, and knowledge of things like invariants (to  
> be confident that your new routine does what the old one did), all  
> of which a comp sci background can teach you a lot about. If you're  
> from the copy-and-paste school of programming, you're not going to  
> be able to respond to change requests in the way that Agile demands,  
> even if you are going through the motions of scrum meetings and pair  
> programming.


Exactly right. Good Agile is supposed to be about fewer highly-skilled  
programmers. I spend a lot of time in the office teaching good  
computer science, which is why we prefer CS graduates as they've got  
at least some of the background. At the least they need to read Domain  
Driven Design, Refactoring, Design Patterns etc.

Chris




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