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Admin
So that's why they never start on Sundays!
Admin
Actually the worst thing I can think of is the 'COMEFROM' command which is actually implemented in some languages....
Yazeran.
Plan: To go to Mars one day with a hammer.
Admin
Maybe it's not nice to say/hear, but the truth often hurts. If you can't succeed with a proven methodology, it's probably not the methodology that is the problem.
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Look like you got link to http://rationalwiki.org/
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No, it's stupid to say and hear, because it conveys no information. It assumes its conclusion- that Agile is the right answer.
It isn't. I'm a huge proponent of Agile methodology, but it's not "a better hammer" and not every problem is a nail. You can't simply say, "well, using Agile teams would solve this problem," because not every organization is suitable for Agile teams to work.
Agile is one tool for organizing teams, and it's a great tool. But it's not appropriate for every situation, and it sure as hell isn't a panacea for your technological woes.
Admin
Scrummy, Funny person only. All sarcastic talk just no sarcastic font-face here. Most "proven methodologies" are not real "proven". CMM5 is big farce in our own country.
Business is business. Manifesto and process driven stuff look good on paper, but real deal is real deal.
That is ugly truth staring at heart of every programmer.
Admin
QFT. Too many times "agile" translates to "We have no procedures and just do whatever and hope it's right" instead of actual agile which has strict guidelines. And, almost all the time, these faux agile environments love the short development cycles and no upfront requirements, but hate and refuse to use the other parts like pair programming, TDD, constant customer feedback, and all the things that, you know, actually make Agile succeed
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I hope you told that guy to F_ck off.
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Many a project in the "latest and greatest development environment" has foundered because the "evangelists" have no idea what mission critical means.
Admin
COMEFROM? Was that in an unauthorized version of COBOL?
Seriously, you can have well-documented projects in virtually any language. It all depends on the programmer.
I remember being given a COBOL program once and was asked to make sense of it. It was apparently a monstronsity that tried to create home-grown ISAM files. It was written as a class project, by managers.
And I used to have a job where my main responsibility was to examine user's code to find the source of their errors!
After several days of trying to read this convoluted mess, which include the now-defunct ALTER verb, I admitted defeat. My manager grinned and said that I was not the first to throw in the towel. Several others had tried and nobody could figure out the code. Maybe it was because the code never worked?
My point: You can have 'self documenting' languages that are impossible to read, or cryptic languages that, if coded by someone who does it well, can be read like a good book.
A well coded program can be a thing of beauty.
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No, Remy, I have never "fired up a BPM tool" in my life, and I hope it stays that way.
CAPTCHA: "augue" - what thinking about BPM tools gives me.
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Whoosh
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Looks like TRWTF is letting him work on this project unsupervised for 2 years with no plan and no interim deliverables.
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Sez you. This whole post is political polemic. I'd call you a cunt but you appear to lack the depth and warmth.
Admin
Actually, you can say that he had an "unfortunate" accident, ie an accident that wasn't unfortunate because everyone else wanted him gone, so it would be unfortunate to dave, but fortunate to everyone else. So the quotes give proper irony to that sentence.
The more popular method (and appropriate to the context of the story) would be an "unfortunate accident" using the whole phrase to indicate that something had been done to him under the guise of an accident, and for the reasons mentioned under "unfortunate" is ironic because its both fortunate to everyone who hates Dave, and was no accident. "How did you get that black eye dave?"... "Uh,... I fell..."
You could also put the quotes around the word "accident" to indicate that, while what happened to Dave was unfortunate, Dave still "fell".
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Of course, it's obvious to me where they went wrong, because I'm so awesome, but the rest of you probably have no idea, so I'm going to tell you.... not because you'll understand, but because it needs to be said!
2Yrs without so much as a single product review or code review or documentation review or any review. If your managers are so inept that they let this happen, then they deserve every single bit of what they got. Bah.
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I see the VB6 inclusion as appropriate for exactly that reason. The kind of guy that would do those things would probably have VB6 as his go-to tool.
Anyway, what is a "BPM tool" supposed to mean? Google searches seem to lead to Business Process Modelling, ie flowcharts, etc. Not sure how that translates to a programming language.
Admin
This is the truth, and I'm also a proponent of agile.
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There is a middleground between scrum and letting people work unsupervised in a hole.
Admin
TWTF - "It was thoroughly documented and well understood by the support team"
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No, but it might have been SLOBOL: http://neil.franklin.ch/Jokes_and_Fun/Languages_Compete_with_APL
About COMEFROM, I remember reading an article about it, but can't find the exact reference any more. However this link should point you in the right direction: (link no. 2) (referenced in this article: (link no. 3) )
Fuck you, Akismet! My comment is not spam. Get lost. What should I write here to convince you I'm not spamming. Is Akismet really TRWTF? Just asking... After the fifth or so attempt, I have removed the links. Hope that helped. No, it didn't, so what to do? I know it. Disguise the links to look not-link-like (WTF???) No, not enough. Maybe remove the links altogether (but they were the whole purpose of my post here) Edit: That helped. Now to try reinserting the links again.
Addendum (2012-06-07 04:22): Link no. 2 should be an article about the comefrom statement: www.fortran.com/fortran/come_from.html and link no. 3 is this small article: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/COMEFROM
Admin
Wonderful, thanks :)
How could they do 'agile' with the guy if he was such a dick? That would have required cooperation.
Admin
It's fine to do this as long as (a) the developer is competent and (b) the requirements are known
In this story, there is an existing system to demonstrate the requirements. And of course one should include the "right" kind of flexibility as a requirement if you expect things to change in the future.
The story here is that the guy is incompetent. And that is the only really compelling argument for requiring him to do iterative/frequent delivery type process.
But of course somebody else would need to feed him the stories and evaluate the deliveries. And if they are incompetent...
Admin
If that was true, we'd still be banging nails in with our fists. Human beings are tool-makers for a reason.
Admin
Hmmm.... do you mean baguettes?
Admin
I suppose Russia and China weren't doing communism correctly.
Agile appeals to managers who want to get something out quickly to impress their superiors (it is linked to the "responsiveness" trend in management). Followed to the letter, agile will produce quick results initially. But the amount of refectoring, testing and pairing required makes it low on overall productivity. It is, if you like, a low latency/low bandwidth approach. By the time a market-ready or deployment-ready system has been produced, it has adtually taken longer than waterfall.
What inevitably happens is that managers attempt to offset the low productivity by skimping on refactoring, testing etc. This causes projects to crash into a brick wall of unmaintainability, and productivity disappears completely. The team is reduced to adding trivial features and doing trivial bug fixes.
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There's many a true word spoken in jest. No country in history has ever got anywhere near being truly communist. Most haven't even got to socialist...
The main problem I see with agile is that the method is far too sensitive to implementation details, forget (or skimp on) one seemingly little thing and the whole thing switches from being beneficial to being a productivity sapping waste of time...
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FTFY
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Captcha 'commoveo' -- commoveo here, sit down, and finish your damn project!
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Ain't it being amazing how frequence Alex no post article and still have scarecrow boldnes to call site "daily?"Any amployee I manage would have be massaged severely to be showing that much reckles.
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Once you start paying him, then you can hold him to deadlines.
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In the words of my Practical Programming professor (whose only taught night classes because his day job was running the university networks) - "make it work, then make it pretty".
Or put another way - If it works but it's ugly, it still works.
Admin
When my contract run out, I am thinking Alex is being donkey-hole and scarecrow for not post article. I ain't be massage his dead body any times soon.
Admin
Guarantees it, indeed! Meanwhile, back in the real world...
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Isn't it fun how much power you wield when you get to pick the perspective for a story?
How many people in here have tried having a job at a place populated by people who think source control is a shared usb-key, and who are satisfied with 5000 lines of csh scripts that need to be hand fed to the system because that is the way an unbroken line of ambitionless grognards did it since the asterisk in *nix meant U.
I'm not saying Dave wasn't a wet behind the ears little .... that needed to earn his keep before he started telling people to do things different. I'm just saying, Ben could easily have been the villain from a different perspective :)
Admin
"From each according to his strength, to each according to his need."
Sound like a good idea? It is certainly popular. But it is the ideology of death.
Every society is composed of only three types of people: producers, beggars, and thieves. Only the producers make the things everyone needs. Beggars talk you into giving them stuff. Thieves just take what they want by violence.
If there were no producers, there would be nothing for the beggars and thieves to consume. They would die when they ran out of stuff to take from each other.
Taking -- usually by threats of violence -- from the producers, and distributing to the beggars and thieves, can work as long as the producers are allowed to produce enough for all. But as the non-producer class grows, it steadily gobbles up the "evil" "greedy" producers until they are drained and gone. Eventually the best producers are destroyed and the whole thing gradually begins to collapse on itself.