Digg

Discover and share the best of the web!
Learn more about Digg by taking the tour.

***** driven development

scottberkun.com — The software industry might be the worlds greatest breeding ground for new systems of management. From Agile, to Extreme Programming , to Test Driven Development (TDD), the acronyms and frameworks keep piling up. Why?

Bury

incabulos 1 year 116 days ago, made popular 1 year 115 days ago

1370 diggs
digg it

sirlancelot88, on 10/11/2007, -5/+23Perhaps these systems of management warrant nomenclature? Ever wonder why there are so many programming terms, such as recursion, random access, inheritance, polymorphism? It's because they accurately describe the function at hand.
- fkr3, on 10/11/2007, -4/+11Great article... the comments are worth reading too.
  
  @ sirlancelot88 - it's not about programming terminology, it's about cynical + accurate names for development models.
- Spuy767, on 10/11/2007, -40/+17This, is why I do all development solo. Committee designed software has led us from the noble path of extremely well written software a la the Mac Plus, where the OS could be installed in under a minute off of a single floppy disc, the computer would to a hard boot in less than 15 seconds, and the average application would start in a second or less, all on a 1 mhz processor, to a world where a 8 3.0 GHz cores is barely enough to bring Windows XP to a functioning desktop in less than a minute. How is this you ask? Well, the original Mac OS, and you could use DOS as an example to a lesser extent, was comprised of essentially hacks. All of the techniques used to write the software were esentially hacks by today's standards. Presently, committee driven software firms like microsoft have take the art out of software programming making it a process that is required to so vehemently follow standards and procedures, that the programming staff functions more as a machine than as creative individuals. In addition, SS grade management leads coders to fear their management more than they desire to be creative. I would say that the most likely description of MS development is CYAE. People want to be creative and ingenious, but for fear of losing their jobs, they just chug grudgingly along, generating code that adheres to strict company standards and is best described as mediocre.
- betterth, on 10/11/2007, -1/+30QA Will Test It Anyway (QWTIA) -
  The belief that writing code right the first time is pointless, as is unit testing, since the in house QA team will test it a hundred different ways and return to you a nicely formatted, cleanly written report on every issue.
  
  I do QA, and I personally see a TON of dev's following this methodology!
- Spuy767, on 10/11/2007, -28/+5I'm sorry, I should have said that Windows ver. 1 was lean and mean, and later versions are progressively more bloated. I forgot that so much as mentioning Apple in a positive light, even if it was 20 years ago was an instant digg down.
- betterth, on 10/11/2007, -5/+30It's not mentioning Apple in a positive light you twit.
  
  Your post was:
  "Technobabble technobabble who cares history techobabble 1mhz wow apple is good technobabble windows probably sucks technobabble i've never heard of paragraphs or the enter key technobabble im just rambling to show everyone i'm smart technobabble technobabble blah blah long paragraphs with no breaks".
  
  Most likely everyone skimmed it and dugg down, since it wasn't interesting, funny, engaging etc. Digg comments are subject to the 10 second rule.
  
  I suppose the best answer to why we dugg you down is "TL, DR"
- mercprog, on 10/11/2007, -6/+1There are some great comments! Here are some of my favorites:
  
  @Venkat - Blame The People Worked and Left (BTPWAL): When you see a glitch, doesn’t matter whether your code caused it or not…through it on the people worked on this project and left the organization. I see this frequently in consulting environments.
  
  @Broccoli - Decapitated Chicken Process - A time honored micromanagement technique where each day managers identify a drastic emergency and require developers drop what they are doing (and whatever process they are using) and immediately attend to the latest conflagration. Since this does the double duty of creating new bugs and making other tasks fall behind, fires become easier and easier for managers to spot and then freak out about. Practically a standard in the games industry.
  
  I'd like to add:
  No money in the budget for new technology (NMBNT) - Where programmers are still working in VB6 because thats all the company has for licenses. So everyone complains and nothing gets done, because it takes so long to do anything. Does anyone like coding in VB6 anymore? what was that like 1998?
  
  - Dave Baldwin
  www.mercenaryprogrammer.com
- jeffmccann, on 10/11/2007, -2/+7http://duggmirror.com/programming/Asshole_driven_development/
- hessian, on 10/11/2007, -0/+13Am I the only one who read this title as an acronym for "ADD"?
- Dubbsacc, on 10/11/2007, -5/+2@spuy767
  Don't know why you're getting dugg down, make more paragraphs maybe.
  
  Anyways, you have a good point about Creativity Vs. Productivity. I definitely overlook creativity in order to meet deadlines, and I think it sucks.
- phantom_mullet, on 10/11/2007, -1/+4@spuy767
  
  Yeah, I have a response: uhhhhhh, what?
- Genady, on 10/11/2007, -0/+3@betterth
  
  What is this mythical 'QA' of which you speak? Surely you're talking about the end users. If only the huddled masses were graced with the good fortune to have QA.
- Juicey, on 10/11/2007, -3/+1@ spuy767
  
  The reason you were dug down is half the jackasses on Digg don't actually work as developers. I agreed 100% about what you said and it's the truth where ever you go. You only have to work as a developer for 6 months to figure that out.
mrsims82, on 10/11/2007, -4/+6Ahhhhhh no more acyronyms i beg you!!!!
- hiPpymIck, on 10/11/2007, -1/+4..maybe use "keyword" + "devlopment" instead..
  
  ***** (driven) dev
  (hot) potato dev
  (learned) helpless(ness) dev
  (get me) pro(moted) dev
  (cover your) ass dev
  
  and there must be other ways
- boituma, on 10/11/2007, -1/+0Business types use acronyms to lend their ideations some of the authority of engineering principles. (Which is funny, because a lot of engineering principles suck and are just hanging around because of inertia.) Then they can speak them really quickly and bowl over the naive.
  
  Management, aka LEADERSHIP, is simple and does not require systematization. Unfortunately, leaders are born, not made. Anyone else is a poseur and overpaid.
- fkr3, on 10/11/2007, -1/+2Everyone is born. Leaders are trained.
holzp, on 10/11/2007, -9/+45It has done wonders for Apple.
- senfo, on 10/11/2007, -7/+1Ok, I'm an idiot. Flame away, but that seriously just went right over my head!
- theonesteve, on 10/11/2007, -6/+14You're right, Apple has succeeded in converting a customer base into smug ***** snobs.
- chuckd, on 10/11/2007, -9/+7Jobs might be an ***** but he's definitely justified in being so... Man's got vision and knows how to communicate it well enough to his employees to keep churning out good hardware/software. It's the no-talent assholes we have to worry about.
- supimscott, on 10/11/2007, -4/+4I think he was referring to Mac users generally being smug assholes by virtue of owning an Apple product.
- clyde2801, on 10/11/2007, -1/+4He was referring to Jobs being a flaming ***** to the people who work for him.
edebolt, on 10/11/2007, -8/+1yeah dude.... can't software be like just organic and cool and not use all the acro's which hurt my brain cells?????
mrsims82, on 10/11/2007, -8/+1Apologies for poor spelling...
hmemcpy, on 10/11/2007, -7/+55Sometimes I park in the handicapped spaces
While handicapped people
Make handicapped faces

I'm an *****
(he's an *****, what an *****)
I'm an *****
(he's a real ***** *****)
- vuzman, on 10/11/2007, -8/+24You know what I'm gonna do?
  I'm gonna get myself a 1967 Cadillac Eldorado convertible
  Hot pink, with whale skin hubcaps
  And all leather cow interior
  And big brown baby seal eyes for head lights (yeah)
  And I'm gonna drive in that baby at 115 miles per hour
  Gettin' 1 mile per gallon,
  Sucking down Quarter Pounder cheeseburgers from McDonalds
  In the old fashioned non-biodegradable styrofoam containers
  And when I'm done sucking down those greeseball burgers
  I'm gonna wipe my mouth with the American flag
  And then I'm gonna toss the styrofoam containers right out the side
  And there ain't a goddamn thing anybody can do about it
  You know why, because we've got the bombs, thats why
  2 words, nuclear ***** weapons, OK?
  Russia, Germany, Romania, they can have all the democracy they want
  They can have a big democracy cakewalk
  Right through the middle of Tiananmen Square
  and it wont make a lick of difference
  Because we've got the bombs, OK?
  John Wayne's not dead, he's frozen, and as soon as we find a cure for cancer
  We're gonna thaw out the Duke and he's gonna be pretty pissed off
  You know why,
  Have you ever taken a cold shower, well multiply that by 15 million times
  That's how pissed off the Duke's gonna be!
  I'm gonna get the Duke, and John Cassavetes,
  and Lee Marvin, and Sam Peckinpah, and a case of whiskey,
  and drive down to Texas and say.....
  
  (Hey! You know, you really are an *****!)
  Why don't you just shut up and sing the song, pal?
  I'm an *****
  (hes' an *****, what an *****)
  I'm an *****
  (he's the world's biggest *****)
  
  A-S-S-H-O-L-E
  Everybody
  A-S-S-H-O-L-E
  
  I'm an ***** and I'm proud of it.
- Akaji, on 10/11/2007, -5/+1@hmemcpy
  
  Sung to 'Mad World'? Did someone actually record a parody of that song?
- TenebrousX, on 10/11/2007, -0/+3No, it's a dennis leary song
  
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WiV2fyvRbs
- InferiorWang, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2where tf do you get the idea that it's sung to Mad World? It's a Dennis Leary song.
  
  edit: beat to it
- FURIOUSgeorge24, on 10/11/2007, -3/+2This is what amazes me sometimes about digg. Comments that make valid points but potentially disagree with the majority or god forbid go over your heads get dugg down, however these two idiots copy some Denis Leary lyrics and get dugg up. Group think at its finest.
BrainCoder, on 10/11/2007, -5/+3This story is senseless...acronyms rock...ever you tried to say XHTML+PHP+CSS without them?
- GMorgan, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2I think trying to say that is too much and we should replace it with an acronym XPC. The final goal of the world is to congeal all terms into acronyms with the one final uber acronym which will simply be A.
- TenebrousX, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1It's actually impossible to say what PHP stands for without using the acronym
- soogy, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1PHP is a recursive acronym.
- garageillusion, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1Speaking of CSS... That page is lacking. Not surprisingly though, if it was built by hardcore programmer types.
  
  "Leave that design stuff up to those film-school-glasses wearin', macbook totin' hooligans. I disabled style sheets years ago. #FFF #CCC #999 #666 #333 #000... Thats all I needs"
kozmo, on 10/11/2007, -1/+7I think some of those new methodologies are being used at my workplace.
- mre5765, on 10/11/2007, -0/+7*All* these methodologies are being used in my workplace.
samuelcotterall, on 10/11/2007, -0/+20Seat of Pants Development (SPD): To embark on a large scale project with inadequate knowledge and resources, but faith in the fact that Google is with you every step of the way.
- GMorgan, on 10/11/2007, -1/+4The one true development paradigm. All that other stuff is just copying somebody else's work, this way you are truly creative :).
- SweetsGreen, on 10/11/2007, -1/+5I would bet this is the most common method used in software development.
- benlindelof, on 10/11/2007, -1/+1Google Rant: Sure, MSDN and Microsoft Usergroups are the best resources for programming, but what's the harm with Google? You get someone's idea to solve a problem similar to yours (just like MSDN and the newsgroups).
  
  Great example: need the syntax for a bizarre TUNA call? TUNA is the system used for TransUnion's Credit Scoring database. With Google, you can quickly search for things in online or offline documentation. The included 'online doc' functions of the website were not as intuitive, powerful or as fast as Google.
  
  Until another Search Engine has been optimized to the level of Google, I'll probably stick with it.
neutralmind, on 10/11/2007, -6/+1GOATSE!!!!
triggerfinger, on 10/11/2007, -2/+2For A-hole managemant see: http://digg.com/business_finance/How_Jerks_In_The_Workplace_Operate_How_to_Keep_Them_Out
hiPpymIck, on 10/11/2007, -1/+2dotBoom is about this - for web design
loquax, on 10/11/2007, -1/+6Actually stuff like this article has been a mainstay of real software engineering. It is frequently called anti-patterning. The theory is that you learn what to do by learning what not to do. The real problem is that physical types of engineering (mechanical, structural, etc) have thousands of years of history and an uncountable number of mistakes to warn people off from doing stupid things (and yes even in physical types of engineering stupid things still happen). Traditional engineering also has thousands of "rules of thumb" to go by. Software, however, has yet to find its fingers, and its thumb is in a very dark and uncomfortable place. Give Software Development/Software Engineering a century or two and then we'll have a better track record. Right now, we are just building mud huts and hoping it doens't rain.
- mercprog, on 10/11/2007, -4/+0Thats a good point, but this is a different, almost unseen engineering. If a structural engineer creates a building the wrong way people die. If a software developer doesn't write a proper function the only people that get mad are the other developers who now have to support the application.
  
  Although I think a century would help, this is a different monster to tame.
  
  - Dave Baldwin
  mercenaryprogrammer.com
- JQP123, on 10/11/2007, -0/+6Too many software developers think "coding" instead of "engineering". They don't give enough consideration to abnormal or unexpected scenarios. They don't ask simple questions that engineers in other professions routinely do, such as "how might this fail" and "what could I do abut it". Engineers are acutely aware of and focused on how the world may interact with their product.
- landofconfusion, on 10/11/2007, -0/+3@mercprog re: "If a software developer doesn't write a proper function the only people that get mad are the other developers who now have to support the application."
  
  Wrong. A few high profile failures...
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariane_5_Flight_501
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIM-104_Patriot#Failure_at_Dhahran
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25
  
  Software development can be every bit as visible as any other type of engineering. Think of all the software that runs air traffic control, bank systems, defense systems, power plants, etc. etc.
- jeezus, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2loquax:
  
  I think this is one of the best comments I've ever seen on Digg. Well done, and thank you.
Nicksname1, on 10/11/2007, -6/+1EXTREME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
seandfeeney, on 10/11/2007, -3/+1Personally I like RTFM - read the ***** manual. It becomes quite frequently used in the software support role.
Sithlrd, on 10/11/2007, -3/+8Why? Because management and the idiots that they listen to are under the mistaken impression that development is a type of Engineering. They think that it is definable and repeatable and, therefore, easy.

Development is FAR more like forging a sword than it is about stamping parts out of sheet metal. I'd say "wake up people" but the people that need to hear this are too stupid to use The Tubes, let alone use Digg.
- NoSlack913, on 10/11/2007, -7/+4Oh Please... I'm so sick of self-congratulatory asshat developers trying to make their profession into something that it isn't. There is a reason the engineering metaphor is used, that we have architects and developers and testers, it is because it SHOULD be repeatable and reusable. It is not forging a sword. You are not some ancient craftsman who was an apprentice then journeyman, who learned "time tested" secrets that only you and 35 others can implement. It is "sword makers" like you that think that "elegant" is better than "correct, reused or maintainable." The single biggest problem I have with software DEVELOPERS is that they are constantly trying to re-invent, re-write, and/or use the latest cool method they read about on some lame blog instead of just using a simple time-tested (engineered) approach to solving a problem that has been solved a hundred times over.
  
  Software development is no longer in it's infancy, a loop is a loop, a data table is a data table, there might just be only one good way to handle an input exception.
  
  if you want to "make a sword" so badly, save some money and go start a company and you can program any way you like, until then... welcome to engineering.
- Genady, on 10/11/2007, -2/+1I seem to keep hearing this from developers mostly. Usually poor ones. Good developers are like house painters. Yeah, there's an element of art to it, but really it's about finding all the short cuts and kludges you can to put the paint on the effin' house faster. Forging a sword indeed. Put the effin' paint on the house and STFU.
thealliedhacker, on 10/11/2007, -3/+2http://www.duggmirror.com
Error601, on 10/11/2007, -0/+7The trick is to find an ***** that also knows what he's doing. Having a pussy that knows what he's doing doesn't help much because he just gets ignored.
xatx2, on 10/11/2007, -1/+1great article and the comments submitted contributed to a great list worth reading. a keeper :)
DivisibleByZero, on 10/11/2007, -1/+2Site slowing down so I'll post my own here instead:
Trapped By Tool Development - No, that's not the best way to approach things, but those are the limitations of "The Tool". The Tool must never be redesigned, only hacked upon.
Godlike, on 10/11/2007, -3/+2So this explains why Goldwave kicks the everloving ***** out of Sony "Soundforge".

And when I say soundforge I actually mean, a program that when installed causes your monitor to spew six week old raw human toilet sewage into your eyes, nose and mouth.
circusugly, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1Good post by Scott Berkun. I was a developer for 20 years and saw GMPM and CDD happen all the time.

Sometimes you needed wings to stay above all of the *****.
grinndaddy, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1Best thing I've read all day. Okay, so it's only 11am, but it'll probably last a while.

Has anyone read any of Scott Berkun's books?
Darkhacker, on 10/11/2007, -4/+3I actually did ADD when working on a website and CMS. I was the ***** and we had an awesome product because of it. As soon as people started getting up their own asses with horrible ideas (one suggested marquees) and people redesigning the entire site from scratch instead of helping me to work on a website that looked incredible and got good reviews from user testing both from an artistic view and a usability view. Everyone wanted something different. In the end I always had to go solo and finish everything myself. I've noticed the people who try to challenge the ***** (me) tend to almost always have zero ideas except for redesigning from scratch without having anything specific in mind, and what little ideas they do come up with, go against anything a sane web developer would do. Ugly color schemes, horrible menu layouts, marquees (eww!) and things that would destroy usability in the way they wanted the layout.

Yes, ADD is bad most of the time, and you shouldn't always have one person in charge of everything, but it's better to have one person making the final decision than have a bunch of whiners that have very little clue of what they actually want other than something different from what the ***** wants. Especially if the ***** actually does know what he is doing. Plus things get done faster. Every try development in a democracy? It quickly turns into Debian. Every team has a leader, and there is always at least one person who will think of the leader as an ***** even if he is a good leader. Mark Shuttleworth has final say over Ubuntu just as Linus Torvalds has final say over Linux. They know what they are doing and sometimes you have to shut people down.

Ever wondered what happened to that website I was the ***** of? Got hacked weeks after I left and when they tried to remove the hacker's defacements they accidentally deleted the ENTIRE public_html folder. Smooth move guys. To this day the .com name goes directly to an Apache file list without even an index page. They're still fighting over the design.
- yazheirx, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1Remember there is a difference between being an a$$hole and being a leader. Projects can not be run by comity nor can they be run by a dictator. They need to be run by someone that can listen to suggestions (weeding out the good from the bad), make a decision and stick to it(unless said decision is proven to be incorrect).
sintaxi, on 10/11/2007, -0/+3Their site going to ***** is a reflection of poor leadership in my opinion.
slapthemonkey, on 10/11/2007, -2/+2Good article and great comments!!!
smokecheck, on 10/11/2007, -2/+1Wow.. I though this article was referring to people who believe 9/11 wasn't an inside job.
po43292, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1I swear my old boss used to make up TLA's (three letter acronyms) all damn day!
n8glenn, on 10/11/2007, -0/+0Your post was:
"Technobabble technobabble who cares history techobabble 1mh

That was technobabble to you? The guy was simply saying that coding solo produces coherent code, and coding by committee produces bloat, which is a perfectly respectable opinion and not at all technobabble, and some of us actually do care about history a little bit instead of just wanting "10 seconds of witty soundbite" like you seem to prefer. Let me guess, you're not a coder are you? More like a 14 year old who thinks he's cool because he's got a cable modem, right?
anarchytv, on 10/11/2007, -1/+1The problem with every computer job posting website, and big companies such as Google and Microsoft, is they all require college degrees, and in some cases, Master's Degrees. As far as I know, that is BS... Einstein flunked out of college, and a good chunk of all the hacking that went on that propelled the PC revolution was done by total academic losers and American rebels. These companies have basically forgotten their roots and are shooting themselves in the foot, and eventually will create rot from within.

A lot of bashing has gone on of duck tape programmers and coders, who can sling code together and get something working, even though its not perfect or pretty... I'm not talking about Indian programmers that ***** and say they know how to do something and can do the job but have no clue what they are doing... I'm talking about American coders that cut their teeth on the 8 bits and knew how to program their first 'box' before they got it home from Sears. I myself am one of those code slingers... you know, there is a hell of a lot to be said for that. I can make something exist, and can hack my way when you are coding into the unknown and working from scratch... most coders being cranked out of these schools couldn't dream up something innovative, and then spend several months on their own, without funding, in passionate hacking marathons, whipping and tweaking their vision for a project up all night after night, to save their lives.

Everything I learned about computers, networking, building, coding, and development, I taught myself. Without a college. And without a degree. Why? Because I have the passion.

The passion of the amateur hacker. An amateur hacker will beat a professional hacker any day of the week. Amateur derives from the latin root "amo", to love... and that's what an amateur does... he hacks because he loves it. Professionals can slander us all they want... I see it all across the net... you have to code this way, or comment this way, and so on and so forth... thats all good when you've already mastered something, then you want to tell people the right way and best way to do things... but when you're out on the ice, when you're learning something new, to think like that is *****. Your code is going to be messy as hell, because you are cutting and pasting examples, you are testing and learning and hacking around idiocincracies, you're like a new baby learning language for the first time. You're knee deep in the zone, outside of your box of the familiar. And that's when the gears in your head are spinning and weaving their most complex dances.

So why hire a sloppy duck tape programmer? Because in todays world, technologies go obsolete overnight, and you are always out of your zone. You're always tying this with that with something you've never heard of before today, and you've got hundreds of web windows open about this type of code or that. The sloppy duck tape programmer types are the one's that whipped up the improvised hack that brought the Apollo 13 mission home safely. Sloppy programmers without lives, without college degrees, are who you want on your team. Cause we rock. We are stone cold hardcore hackers. So all you job boards with your requirements for a college degree, and all you snotty ***** software project managers that want to grill us on this or that during an interview... kiss off. It doesn't matter if I don't know Ruby on Rails or whatever is this months flavor darling keyword language or tool you search for through the resumes... I can pull of the information on it and learn just what I need to know about it to get the job done in a New York second. And use my expensive brain elsewhere than learning stuff that will never be relevant to the project of a language. einstein http://anarchy-tv.com
123zoozle, on 12/17/2007, -0/+0Why hire a programmer? http://www.dassnagar.com/Software/manpower-outsour ...
yogastore, on 06/30/2008, -0/+0http://astore.amazon.com/la.crosse.atomic.clock-20
http://astore.amazon.com/la.crosse.technology.wire ...
http://astore.amazon.com/upright.bagless.vacuum-20
http://astore.amazon.com/dyson.upright.vacuum-20
http://astore.amazon.com/hoover.bagless-20
http://astore.amazon.com/hoover.canister-20
http://astore.amazon.com/pyrex.storage-20
http://astore.amazon.com/pyrex.storage.lids-20
http://astore.amazon.com/inflatable.bed-20
http://astore.amazon.com/aerobed.inflatable.bed-20
Login or register to add a comment

Create a new account or login to join in the conversation on Digg. You'll also be able to Digg stories to help promote things you like.

***** driven development

Login or register to add a comment