Hi, I'm Benedikt Deicke, and I'm a freelance web and software developer. I'm mainly building user focused web applications using Ruby on Rails and JavaScript. Additionally I'm currently studying for my master's degree and enjoying photography in my spare time. Feel free to get in touch with me, I'm available for hire!

March 8th, 2007
Agile Development

Since a few months I’m working on a project at university. We are creating a browser-based whiteboard-like collaboration plattform called ‘EduCs’. The university told us to use the waterfall approach. We spent the whole last term creating documents and just finished the design-phase about two weeks ago. I already hated it shortly after we started and looked for alternatives. Thanks to Rails I got to know ‘Agile Development’. (We had a lecture about software engineering which never mentioned it).

Since then I’ve been reading books, watching talks and listening to Chaosradio a lot. Agile Development seems to fit my feeling about how to do software. As I’ve to do an internship in about one year to get my bachelor degree, I’ve started to look out for companies using agile methods. I didn’t expect it to be this hard. I’ve been asking some of my friends how the projects are done in their companies. Shockingly most of them told me that their not even doing the waterfall approach or anything similar. Only one told me – while working on a half finished website, that was going to be released the next day – they had a whole bunch of people solely managing and organizing the projects.

Why is this? Are there so few companies caring about how they do their software or do I just know the “wrong” people?

Posted by benedikt – Filed in Agile Development
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1 Comments for “Agile Development”

  1. Jan-Torsten Milde Jan-Torsten Milde said on June 6th, 2007 at 12:20 AM:

    Hi,

    I don’t think, that you know the wrong people … this is just real life software development. Managing software production is really complex. The software developers have to accept the managing style … and usually disagree about “right way”.

    With respect to agile methods, I personally agree with you. It is very programmer friendly and is well suited for smaller projects. When asking my friends in real life companies, they usually dislike agile methods. Many of them think, that agile programming leads to chaos. It seems that the old way of software engineering is still favoured by most (bigger) companies, like HP, IBM etc.

    I think one should take the best a both worlds: with respect to customers it is very important to have a clear understanding of their requierements. With respect to software development one should be as flexible as possible. As it turns out: to do agile programming effeciently and sucessfully you need to be a good programmer :)

    Best wishes

    Jan-Torsten

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