MissingMethod

Chris Petrilli has a good rant against Robert Mcllree’s lament that enterprise architects are fighting a battle against, well, everyone. In response to Robert’s argument that serious software involves more time and money than “agile” folks care to admit, Chris says:

If you deliver an “enterprise solution” in 2 years, and I deliver what you degrade as a “non-enterprise solution” next week, whose solution do you think earns more money for the organization? Who do you think abates the costs faster? Most importantly, who do you think learns where the mistakes are and the real requirements exist.

I think the last part of that is the most important, so I’ll repeat it: who do you think learns where the mistakes are and the real requirements exist.

I’ll grant my experience developing anything for the enterprise is limited, but I think the lesson applies to anyone doing any development of any size. You can’t know what your real requirements are until you start building something.

Sure, you can (and should) come up with a reasonable, informed guess as to what your application needs to do and how. But if you’re not prepared, even expecting, to have that guess turn out to be completely wrong, I think you run the risk of being married to an idea of an application no one really wants.

A chef may write out a recipe before he sets butter to the pan, but if he doesn’t understand it’s not the recipe his customers want to eat, he stinks.

I think there’s a purpose and a place for a plan. Without a recipe, we wouldn’t know where to start. But process doesn’t prove anything to the end user.

Last Modified : April 16th, 2006
Filed under : Ruby on Rails
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