As Roedy Green has pointed out elsewhere, this is a world with a much
shorter attention span. Frankly, I don’t think most big corporates have the
agility to cope.
[ SNIP ]
True agility (not "agile" in the methodology sense) gives you just that
- shorter time-to-market with an equally capable, equal-quality product.
And there's no question that smaller teams with fewer formal
stakeholders, and less rigid process, and fewer managers, can often beat
the big boys. In other words, for the same end-result they are faster.
The downside to being "agile" is that often conservatism and process is
a good thing. Above I qualified carefully: equally capable, and
equal-quality. What actually happens in real life is that the small
teams are often faster...and that's all they are. Nice feature-set, but
badly-tested bug-ridden software, with little or no thought given to how
it fits into a larger ecosystem (because this small, "agile" team is
isolated).
What frequently happens is that the megacorps - with their professional
developers - simply snap up the ideas, once they start to prove out in
the market, maybe keeping one or two of the salvageable original "agile"
coders. The professional developers - the "drones" - are the ones that
actually fix the original code and rewrite it and make it work.
Sometimes (read often) they turf the original codebase because it's so
awful, and only keep the good ideas.
It only seems like there is a magical, quick road to product. There
really isn't.
AHS
--
That's not the recollection that I recall...All this information is
certainly in the hands of the auditor and we certainly await his report
to indicate what he deems has occurred.
-- Halifax, Nova Scotia mayor Peter Kelly, who is currently deeply in
the shit
