Wednesday, June 6, 2007

RE: Why I Don't Support Short Release Cycles

Justin James doesn't support short release cycles or agile methods. He argues that these lead to buggy, incomplete implementations that damage the industry.

I agree, buggy and incomplete releases are problems, and pandemic. But I've worked in organizations with long release cycles and waterfall processes that release software that sounds just like what he's complaining about, and I've worked in organizations with short release cycles and an agile approach where quality and complete features are paramount.

So, while I agree that the symptoms he's describing are a problem, and possibly even increasingly common, I would have to disagree that the symptoms are necessarily connected to the causes he identifies. The most common cause, in my opinion, is a deliberate willingness to sacrifice some quality and completeness, usually coming from the "business" rather than the implementation team. It's really that simple.

Reading through the comments below his post, others seem to agree with me.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

hi there,

the big problem with Waterfall is that it takes a lot of time to know if the project is going to be succesful or not.

With iterative development(agile/XP) process, even if the featureSet is frozen ahead of time, as long as we do full regression testing every alternate iteration, the project manager will know how well the code behaves.

The whole team(including management) will have a higher level of comfort with the code using XP/Agile processes.

BR,
~A