Friday, December 18, 2009

Late response to "Agile is treating the symptoms, not the disease"

Ted Neward reiterated an opinion Billy Hollis shared at the Patterns & Practices summit: Agile is treating the symptoms, not the disease. The basic idea is that our current tools make software development too complex, and an agile approach is an attempt to manage that complexity.

While I agree that software development is too complex, I don't really see Agile attempting to address software and tool complexity; it's more about responding to change during the development lifecycle. With short iterations and frequent deliverables, there are more opportunities for feedback and changes in direction before a project is completed, which should result in a much better product being delivered.

I think the point that Billy was trying to convey is that there are projects out there that are small enough (or not important enough?) that it's okay if they're haphazardly slapped together; the resulting applications just need to work, but we no longer have tools that simple applications to be developed simply. The number of applications, frameworks, and libraries required to build applications is nearly overwhelming today, and there are no signs of movement towards simplicity.

Ted rephrases Billy's talk with the question "Where is this decade's Access?". Access is still around and still shipping with Office, so this decade's Access is Access. Perhaps the real issue is that nobody cares about Access anymore, so all of the non-professional developers (i.e. they don't do it for a living) don't know about it because it doesn't get any press?

I dislike Access as much as the next "professional developer" and I have seen the problems it can cause first hand. However, it still addresses an important need cheaply and effectively, and usually for quite some time before it's no longer up to the task and needs to be replaced by a more robust implementation.

Maybe there should be a revival in interest in Access, maybe...