Mike, don’t know if you remember the somewhat tortuous title of my MBA dissertation – ‘multi paradigm multi methodologies as a method of managing IT projects’?! What this is about is that we can look at using both hard and soft paradigms as a means of managing IT projects – and maybe a combination of both is better at different stages of the SDLC (whether or not we’re waterfall, agile etc). There are some great techniques and approaches out there (including Agile, Kanban and other softer approaches) but in my humble opinion, the good project manager should be able to:

1) Select the methodologies most appropriate for the project under development at a particular point in time based on a variety of criteria. These would include scope, organisational culture, objectives, resources (both personalities and constraints) etc.

2) Implement those methodologies throughout the project’s lifecycle at the most appropriate time because that’s what suits – and not because that’s what some Quality Manual says you have to. (Which, as a QA manager, feels a little odd).

What I want to say is, that as an industry, we need to ‘professionalise’ ourselves, and we can learn a good deal from our colleagues in Operations Research. We may be the new kids on the block, but that block wasn’t build yesterday.

Interesting experience report. It’s become a “best practice” to recommend that people try out a new language/tool/hairstyle for non-production tasks like testing, but your experience shows that this strategy is not necessarily the best way to try out any and every new language/tool/hairstyle.

At the OSCON Scala Summit, Alex Payne and Coda Hale did a joint session where they discussed their experiences adopting and using Scala for large-scale production applications (Twitter and Yammer, respectively). They specifically rejected this “best practice” of starting with testing and instead recommended that you solve some nasty problem with your new new tool of choice and thereby demonstrate that the new tool is vastly superior to the old tool, etc.

The size of the Scala language and libraries doesn’t make it a great adjunct tool, like many scripting languages. I think it’s fair to say that it should be your primary tool to justify the effort to master it and use it effectively or you probably won’t get a clear benefit from using it. I’ve made that choice on a few projects and don’t regret the decision, despite immature tools, etc.

Sorry for the delay. The links should now be working again.

Mike

The links for the presentations aren’t working. Could you please repost or send a link to where I can access? The presentation was instrumental in my initial understanding of retlang; I need to now help a co-worker with his understanding.

Thanks!

Shane

I don't think Agile, or at least not Agile principles, is dead. I see more companies going down the road. Ultijately all their goals are the same – better transparency into projects, predicable delivery, and faster dekivery of value to customers. Agile is one way to help these things happen.

And whether or not there is a glut of consultants or not weighing down the community, Agile has laid a foundation that we can all build on.;