RE: What do people work from - more

[quills -at- airmail -dot- net]

I agree with Sean. Let me show you a little of what you are living with.
Banks/financial institutions follow the Agile philosophy, mostly because
of time to market pressures and because they don't understand that their
sevices are technology driven. Thusly they have become software houses in
their own right.

Nothing to worry about right? Wrong. I know from a 3 year stint in one
major credit card processing company (name with held to protect me from
legal actions) that they do not bother to document the system, the system
operation or the accumulated changes to their processes. They don't
document the overal system processes and software, the operationaly
departments don't document their individual processes and software, and no
one has a handle on it.

People it's your money, your credit. The efforts of the software engineers
to reinvent the wheel has sufficed so far. But it creaks along, tottering
from side to side. I watched projects being cancelled because they
couldn't be completed in time and within budget because everything had to
be done from scratch and reintegrated into other areas, repeatedly. I saw
the same intitiative poorly implemented, and then reimplemented twice,
both times being cancelled because it was costing too much and taking too
much time. When I left, the same intiative was being resurrected for a
third try. And then the company was purchased by a larger bank.

So how do you really want your money spent and your credit taken care of?
The Agile way, or the old rigourous way?

Scott

>  Sean Hower replied:

> As for the "rigour of producing an FS, then DS, and then code." Depends on
> the house, but I'm willing to bet it comes down to deadlines handed down
> from a management that doesn't really understand what it takes to develop
> what they ask for. Add to this a near mania for reducing time to market
> and very quickly the focus shifts from producing something good (which
> requires the previously mentioned rigour) to producing something that is
> good enough and can be fixed after the product is out the door. Of course,
> because time to market continues its push, said fixes are put on the back
> burner, adding additional demands on developers and pushing those pesky
> specs onto an even further back burner. Based on the very little research
> I've done, it seems that the Agile Manifesto is a reaction to this
> environment. Note that I'm not putting a value judgement on any of this,
> I'm just offering up my own observations. I could be way off. :-)
>


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