strobelight juggling & xp

[Kragen Sitaker]

Dave Long writes:
> Juggling in a strobe light is difficult . . .
> Waterfall (throw-over-the-transom?) development,
> on the other hand, is like juggling with one's
> eyes closed.  . . .
> 
> Turn the strobe light on, though, and eyes open
> is harder.  You get position feedback, but no
> momentum feedback; the bad data are worse than
> no data.
> 
> Are there any problem domains in software that
> are more strobe-lit than normally illuminated?

This is a very interesting question.  I've pondered it for almost a
week, and still have no really good answers.  Some of the following
seem to sort of apply:
- developing with feedback from focus groups and brief user tests,
  which gives you a good idea of how novices will use your software
- developing with feedback from marketing
- developing with feedback from your last release, which was two years
  ago
- developing in an environment that conspires to make your bugs
  invisible (Perl, JavaScript, and C++ all have automatic type
  conversion; it causes subtle bugs in all three languages)
- developing based on metrics divorced from reality: elegance of
  design or conformance to spec, for example.  (Conformance to spec is
  a part of the waterfall thing: you may toss your spec wrong and not
  find out until too late, but you can still have continuous feedback
  telling you how close you are to the erroneous trajectory plotted by
  the spec.)

-- 
<kragen@pobox.com>       Kragen Sitaker     <http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/>
Perilous to all of us are the devices of an art deeper than we ourselves
possess.
                -- Gandalf the Grey [J.R.R. Tolkien, "Lord of the Rings"]