Comment by tptacek

2 years ago

I dispute some of this, only because I was doing a software startup from '98-'01 and we managed to hire not one but two XP devotees that dragged me into reading this stuff. To this day, though, I'm still mostly unfamiliar with the particulars of Agile.

I get that Agile was bigger than XP (who could deny that?), and agree preemptively that Raymond's article is probably the first time many people heard about incremental release strategies. That's true of a lot of things in it! My big complaint about those ideas is that they're not Raymond's --- not even in the sense of waiting to be distilled from Linux by Raymond.

The true-feeling parts of Raymond's article read to me like a document of, for lack of a better term, late 1990s programming thinking. Just a bunch of stuff that was floating in the air, a bunch of Fred Brooks, and then weird attempts to generalize design decisions in Fetchmail to the whole of software development.

I appreciate getting called on this and forced to think more carefully about it. Thanks for the response!

3 comments

tptacek

Reply
doctor_eval  2 years ago

I completely agree with you about C&B. Even at the time, it felt to me mostly like a restatement of the zeitgeist. But Raymond was very influential at the time and was apparently one of the reasons Netscape released Mozilla as free software.

I also agree that “release early and often”, in particular, was a significant contribution, if not for originality then for reach. Not everyone was exposed to XP at the time, but ESR seemed to be everywhere. And for my part, the main take away from XP had been around pair programming which as a startup myself, I wasn’t into/couldn’t afford/didn’t subscribe to anyway.

But I do feel your comments about XP and agile miss the mark a tiny bit. XP was developed by Kent Beck - who went on to be one of the authors of the Agile Manifesto. Perhaps because of this, XP is considered an agile practice.

But agile is really just a set of values and principles. There are many practices that people claim as “agile”, many of which do not meet the criteria of the agile manifesto (I’m looking at you, SAFe).

I think in some ways, C&B was a precursor to the Agile Manifesto, which itself it arguably just a restatement of principles and practices that already existed.

(My limited personal experience with engineering in large traditional companies is that the manifesto is ignored, commercial practices and consultants who slap “agile” stickers on their traditional SDLCs still rule - and it is still, largely, the dark ages. I was heavily criticised for using a CD strategy for some enterprise software at the same brand name company that required me to enforce password rotation… in 2018).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_programming

https://agilemanifesto.org/

dannyobrien  2 years ago

Things certainly happened very quickly in that period -- it's staggering to think that 1997 was only four years after the web began to percolate, and C&B I think got its lift because it happened when Netscape decided to open source their browser.

It's definitely hard to work out a chronology when things are piling one after the other, and also there wasn't the same consistency of knowledge propagation. It was still very hard to find out new things online.

Thanks for the thanks!