Bulldozer00's Blog

You may not believe this, but overall, I like “agile” management and coding practices- where they fit. The most glaring shortcoming that I, and perhaps only I, perceive in the “agile” body of knowledge concerns the dearth of guidance for handling both the social and technical dependencies present in every software development endeavor. The larger the project (or whatever you #noprojects community members want to call it), the more tangled the inter-dependencies. There are, simultaneously: social couplings, technical couplings, and the nastiest type of coupling of all: socio-technical couplings.

The best analogy I can think of to express my thoughts on the agile dependencies black hole is the linear vs multiplicative complexity conundrum as expressed so elegantly by Bertrand Meyer in his book, “Agile!“. But instead of the family friendly linguini and lasagna images Mr. Meyer employs in his book, I, of course, choose to use imagery more in line with the blasphemous theme of this blog:

The complexity of the system is at least equal to the product of the problem and solution complexities. At worst, there are exponents associated with one or both multiplicands.