I have been working on a mindMap that illustrates the kinds of activities, research and technologies that me and my co-workers do in our everyday practice. While I realize that this is somewhat specific to our company and the work that we do I thought it would be interesting to get feedback on it. I hope to refine this as we develop the practice.

So if you have anything that you’d like to share, please comment on Flickr.

Now while watching this video I didn’t know if EDS was attempting to illustrate how agile they are
OR
commenting on how rediculous agile development can be.

I don’t know if you can equate building airplanes to building software because I presume that an airplane builder knows what an airplane is, how it should work and they have built one before. How do you do iterative builds on a flying airplane? If a wing doesn’t work while flying can you rip it off and rebuild it? Is EDS that good??? WOW!

I like agile, but I am not a true believer, some of it still feels like bullshit to me. The one assumption that has always bothered me is that your project has smart experienced developers building your software who can make educated guesses on interactivity and results based on their tacit :-P knowledge.

I work in a world of software development that has a new domain with new business practices, governance models, acronyms & language terms and regulator rules for almost every project.

NEWSFLASH
Many (not all) programmers are NERDS and therefore may not understand things like aesthetics, business practices or even everyday software conventions. Everyone knows at least one brilliant developer that can shell script a full length ASCII animation of Star Wars but could not buy penicillin from drugstore.com to save their dying chicks.

I think I once heard Ken Schwaber talk about how he was on a panel where he was asked by a CMMI guy how he planned to not make Scrum into the bloated beast that CMMI is because when they started they did not want a lot of process either. That is a bad recounting but I can’t find the reference, but what I am trying to say is that optimum processes tend to require optimum inputs and environments things get messy when you need to ensure predictable success while accounting for variants.

I truly wish I could depend on my teammates to make the correct assumptions but I can’t and that kinda depresses me… later.