devgrind

Today I stumbled upon another source of developer wisdom, Des Traynor’s Programming Theorems. One of the theorems rings especially true for me after the recent insights into developing a Sudoku solver the TDD way:

For every Architecture Astronaut out there, there is at least one coder who thinks that being “Agile” is a perfect substitute for foresight.

If you wonder what Architecture Astronauts are, its a term coined by Joel Spolsky with regard to people climbing up the abstraction ladder a little too far:

When you go too far up, abstraction-wise, you run out of oxygen. Sometimes smart thinkers just don’t know when to stop, and they create these absurd, all-encompassing, high-level pictures of the universe that are all good and fine, but don’t actually mean anything at all. These are the people I call Architecture Astronauts.

I know that I tend to be an Architecture Astronaut sometimes, probably it’s because thinking meta keeps me from the exhausting work of bothering with all the real-world problems. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was the main reason for developers to become Architecture Astronauts at all.

But Architectural Outer Space isn’t a place where I stay very long usually, because its my experience that the lack of oxygen disrupts any attempts of getting actually something done. And that’s where agility fits in: If I get the whole idea of agility right, it’s all about getting things done (unless you use it as an excuse to shutdown your brain).

Filed by Arne at 2:22 pm under agility, development
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