[Gllug] Development Methodologies

[Richard Jones]

On Wed, Dec 21, 2005 at 10:57:34AM +0000, Richard wrote:
> Richard Jones wrote:
> >Small team, intelligent developers, capable programming language,
> >rapid iterative development directly involving the end users.  Works
> >for us anyway.
> >
> I wonder how far this scales, personally. I think that you're absolutely 
> right that this is a great model for small-medium projects - but when 
> the scope of the project creeps outside a manageable group of users (ie: 
> representatives of all the different user groups can't reasonably be 
> involved simultaneously), and/or the requirements simply don't allow a 
> small team to complete the project in a reasonable timescale, what then? 
> What of the poor CIO's ego when they can't have huge, sexy budgets for 
> enormous, unwieldy projects? What of empty promises like Model Driven 
> Architecture?
> 
> ThoughtWorks, Martin Fowler et al. talk up an XP-like development 
> methodology for enterprise systems, and I wonder what it looks like. If 
> anyone can explain the guts of it, then I'm all ears.
> 
> My rule of thumb has been that the upper limit on the size of a 
> development team is about eight, but six is probably better - and 
> anything they can't achieve is a symptom of a poorly scoped project. In 
> essence, I agree with what you're saying; but I'm playing a bit of the 
> devil's advocate here. I'm watching a floundering bid in the £XX,000,000 
> region as I write... What odds of a successful delivery? I give it slim 
> to none.

Yes, I broadly agree.  The problem is to keep the project small, or
split into autonomous units which can be managed entirely separately.
The only experience I've had with absolutely huge projects was (as you
might guess) UK government projects.  They seem to demand expansive
projects, even where something simple would have sufficed.  I once
spec'd a contract for the UK govt secure mail system, and my proposal
basically involved exim + imap + some SSL + a web mail interface.
Needless to say we didn't get that contract :-)

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, CTO Merjis Ltd.
Merjis - web marketing and technology - http://merjis.com
Team Notepad - intranets and extranets for business - http://team-notepad.com
-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at gllug.org.uk
http://lists.gllug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/gllug