Wednesday, June 18, 2008

where was that agile stuff?

Hackaday posted a link to waxy.org's online copy of Code Rush... a documentary about Netscape open sourcing Navigator and creating Mozilla. The amount of progress over the past decade on this code base is truly amazing when you step back and look at it from a historical perspective.

What I think is interesting is that you get a glimpse of the development process, which appears to be: controlled chaos. The only real metric they used was simply "are there any bugs left".

When I look at how much time we spend today fussing over which methodology to use or having to make "business cases" for the existence of software devs on the payroll, I can't help but wonder if the task of trying to explain and quantify software development in business terms isn't killing progress in getting-stuff-done terms.

Maybe getting to zaroo boogs is the only thing we should really be tracking because maybe that's the only thing that matters.

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