John Reynolds's Blog

Standing on the shoulders of giants....

We often hear George Santayana's adage:
"Those who do not understand the past are destined to repeat it"
Study history or you're going to screw up. Good advice, but rather on the negative side of the Kharmic spectrum.

Less often do we hear Sir Isaac Newton�s more positive sentiment:
"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants"

Newton's adage is the one that came first to mind when I encountered a great article by Craig Larman and Victor Basili entitled:
Iterative and Incremental Development: A Brief History

Larman and Vasili's article is packed with great examples of how IID (which is essentially the same as Agile programming) has been successfully used for decades on large scale mission critical projects. For example, from the recollections of Gerald M. Weinberg, who worked on project Mecury, comes this quote:

"We were doing incremental development as early as 1957, in Los Angeles, under the direction of Bernie Dimsdale [at IBM�s Service Bureau Corporation]."
"I do remember Herb Jacobs (primarily, though we all participated) developing a large simulation for Motorola, where the technique used was, as far as I can tell, indistinguishable from XP."

• A system's users seldom know exactly what they want and cannot articulate all they know.
• Even if we could state all the requirements, there are many details that we can only discover once we are well into implementation.
• Even if we knew all these details, as humans we can only master so much complexity.
• Even if we could master all this complexity, external forces lead to changes in requirement, some of which may invalidate earlier decisions.

"...IID concepts have been and are a recommended practice by prominent software-engineering thought leaders of each decade, associated with many successful large projects, and recommended by standards boards."
Yet, even though the value of IID is well known among literate, experienced software engineers, some commercial organizations, consulting companies, and standards bodies still promote a document-driven single-pass sequential life cycle as the ideal. We conclude with this recommendation: In the interest of promoting greater project success and saving taxpayer dollars, let's continue efforts to educate and promote the use of IID methods."

Comments

• More validation of agile approaches
  http://www.roundtable.com/MRTIndex/FFPD/ART-maccormack.html

  'Alan MacCormack, a professor at Harvard Business School, was studying successful software development processes. He and his colleagues asked executives at a software firm to provide two case examples, one from a "good" project, and another from a "bad" one. Two projects were identified, each of which yielded products that had just shipped. Observing the state of these products over time, MacCormack and his researchers saw that the "good" project failed in terms of such factors as market acceptance, expert quality rating, and productivity. According to MacCormack, the project that management said was a good project "turned out to be uniformly bad," while the project that executives said was "bad" was a marketplace success.'

  Basically, it's more important to be flexible and responsive than inflexible and to keep to the plan.

  Ian.

  Posted by: ifairman on December 08, 2003 at 08:34 AM

• Shoulders of Giants
  It's funny you should mention Newton's statement as being positive. I'm currently reading "Science: A History 1534-2001" by John Gribbin which suggests that his comment was in fact a barely disguised personal attack.

  It written in a letter to a scientific competitor, Robert Hooke, who had complained, correctly, that Newton was not giving him proper credit for his discoveries. Newton's response that he had seen further by "standing on the shoulders of Giants" was intended to rule out Hooke, who was famously short and hunchbacked.

  This is not 100% accepted history but it does seem to fit in with Newton's general demenour and behaviour.

  Posted by: bawjaws on December 09, 2003 at 07:12 AM

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