Bulldozer00's Blog

Either directly or subliminally, the message I hear from hardcore agilista big-wigs is that an agile process trumps a traditional plan-driven software development process every time and in every context – no exceptions.

On the other hand, the message I hear from traditionalists is… well, uh, I don’t hear much from traditionalists anymore because they’ve been beaten into silence by the hordes of unthinking zombies unleashed upon them by the agilista overlords.

Regarding the “betterness” of #agile over #traditional (or #noestimates over #estimates, or #noprojects over #projects), please leave your handful of personal anecdotes at home. Charismatic “I’ve seen” and “in my (vast) experience” stories don’t comprise science and aren’t sufficient justifications for sweeping generalizations. The science simply doesn’t exist – especially for the construction of large, distributed software systems.

I suppose that if a plausible (and thus, falsifiable) theory of software development processes was to be methodically derived from first principles and rigorously tested via a series of repeatable experiments, the general result would end up looking something like this:

What predictive capabilities do you think a credible theory of software development processes would generate? Show Me Your Curves.