Letters to the Editor: Give superprogrammers their due

By SD Times Editorial Board

February 2, 2012 — (Re: “The myth of 10X superprogrammers”), Oh, and Picasso was a house painter.

What caught my attention in this article was the lack of documented support for your remark. On the other hand, the 10X proposition is supported by scholarly works published and available for anyone to read if they wish. To help you get started, run a Web search for "Capers Jones".

In the decade past, a great many organizations have bought into the misguided proposition that process trumps people and tools overcome incompetence. These ideas have been packaged in all sorts of nice, polite terms. The impact of these ideas has been largely negative in terms of quality of product, time to market and meeting customer needs. In addition, it casts a poor light on important tools.

People are the essential element in art, literature, sports... and software engineering. Design matters, and design aesthetic is in desperately short supply. Engaging the right people is extraordinarily important. Keeping them engaged is harder yet.

Mark Phillips
USA

Old news on Scrum hybrids
You are on point but many years too late (re: “Water-Scrum-fall is the reality of agile”). I was a consultant in 2006 preaching the virtues of a true Scrum process framework implementation. Within one organization I worked with, they had four delivery streams active (think million-dollar projects), and only one of them was true Scrum. The others were what we called "ScrummerFall" or "AgileFacade"—a mash-up of cherry-picked Scrum and waterfall features.

These three delivery streams had management that resisted a full Scrum implementation, and it showed. The one true Scrum delivery stream that had a project stakeholder sitting with the project team was on time, on budget, and was the model for all other future delivery streams once the CIO saw how well it worked.

Remember though, waterfall is not without its place. Waterfall is useful when everything is known up front or needs to be known up front (think spaceship software). Agile is useful when things are not known (think most Web development these days). Iterative (cycles of understanding) and incremental (frequent delivery of working system) process frameworks do not always fit into every situation, with good reason.

Daniel Bullington
USA

Java is not actually viable anymore
(Re: “Look what 2011 washed in”), Microsoft won, as I knew they would in 1998. Sun's market capitalization was less than Microsoft's cash in hand account; Sun was always going to lose. Intellectually, too, Java lost; Haskell is where the action is, and many of the key Haskell dudes work for Microsoft Research.

As an industrial or commercial language, Java is still there, but it's a zombie language. No one in their right mind would sit down and learn it. And you know what? It always sucked. All the elegance of C with the speed of Smalltalk.

DavidNcl
United Kingdom

Related Search Term(s): agile, Java, Scrum, superprogrammers

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