Quoting from an interview in "Communications of the ACM" 2008 08 with Donald Knuth:
The setup is Donald had written a complete spec and assigned it to bright students and then did nothing to manage them as they implemented the spec.
"To my amazement, the students, who were outstanding students, did not complete it."
Only later when he tried to implement it, did he find that it was not so easy.
"Because going from my specification, which I thought was complete, they had an impossible task..."
He later goes on to point out that even with the most complete of specifications, questions arise every 5 minutes as you write code.
In effect, his approach was waterfall with a Big Design Upfront. What he found was a cornerstone of Agile practices, you need to implement a portion of the project and then you will learn enough to start asking questions.
No comments:
Post a Comment