Ideal World / Real World
A major project I’ve been working on for the last ten months has just gone live, giving me some time recently to take stock, do a bit of R&D, and catch up on some reading. I’ve been reflecting on how to approach things better in the future, and to this end, I’ve just finished two very different books about the software development process. O’Reilly’s Extreme Programming Pocket Guide is a handy little summary of the approach (only 81 pages), depicting a near-utopian development shop where everyone is happy, and projects come in under budget and on time. It got me quite fired up, actually, and some of the concepts described are interesting. But deep down, I just know this would never happen in the real world—too much politics, too many personalities at play in the workplace, in my humble opinion. ...