> I chose to use words that are deliberately > provocative, and engender > some of the fears of agile methodology. Agile methods > do emphasize > real time communication, over written documents. > Agile methods also > emphasize "working software" as the measure of > progress, and produce > very little written documentation relative to other > methods. This has > resulted in criticism of agile methods as being > undisciplined, which > BTW is the point I was trying to emphasis with my > choice of words.
Where existing functionality for the user would not be broken, "working" is certainly better than nothing. But IMO, a distinction between "working" and "production quality for high-reliability requirements" would be essential, especially where the latter has historically been closer to the standard. I don't have one handy right now, but ISTR an "Extras" directory on Solaris install CDs, for stuff that was useful but not yet quite bundled, for whatever reason. Of course, for speed, there needs to be a package download approach rather than just an entire distribution on physical media. And for something still evolving rapidly, it seems to me all the more important to declare those aspects that are unstable, to discourage dependencies on unstable features or interfaces. Only through discipline can rapid and deep evolution coexist with acceptance of upgrades. As for documentation, IMO there had better at least be a commitment to develop it too, even if only in the form of a wiki or some such, so that as one converges on stability, a snapshot can be taken and the result rewritten into proper documentation. Heck, how can you do development at all with the possibility of non-zero turnover among the developers, unless there's something other than just the code to capture design choices and principles? So I think the more aggressive a model one chooses to follow, the more carefully one has to define the limits of the model. This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
