Re: PG: Hackers and Painters

[P T Withington <address@hidden>]

On Thursday, May 15, 2003, at 19:31 US/Eastern, Scott McKay wrote:

> In my experience, this produces code that works pretty
> damn well, and you get it done pretty quickly.  However,
> there are some applications which are very well specified
> and whose requirements include zero defects.  It is also
> my experience that this methodology we are all talking
> about is not as good at doing that, precisely because
> even in the face of unit testing, it de-emphasizes the
> very compulsive management-heavy processes that help
> to guarantee zero-defects.
>
> Sometimes the heavy-weight SEI-style processes really
> seem to be the right tool for the job.  I don't think
> I would fly on a plane whose controllers were running
> XP'ed software.

Case in point: while Scott worked in 'agile' mode developing the Dylan 
UI Manager, I worked in 'SEI' mode developing the garbage collector.  
The GC group believed the structured approach was important because we 
knew that errors in the GC are extremely difficult to debug and that 
the entire project relied on the GC providing a stable base to work 
from.  So even within a single project different development strategies 
may apply.