Buzzword Driven Development Isn’t Gonna Help You
Posted by Davy Brion on February 10th, 2009
You gotta do Agile Development. No wait, these days you gotta do Lean. Oh, and don’t forget to do Test Driven Development (TDD). No wait, these days you gotta do Behavior Driven Development (BDD). Oh wow, you’re not doing Domain Driven Design (DDD)? Dude, you suck!
If someone asked me to summarize the majority of the content that the software development community has put forward in the last couple of weeks/months, both on blogs and mailinglists or any other medium that enables online discussion, the paragraph above would be it. Sad, isn’t it? I often get the impression that a large part of this community has simply lost the ability to put things into perspective.
Each and every one of the popular development styles are often touted to solve all of your development-related problems. Well, to be fair, not all of the proponents of these development styles will make these claims. But a large majority of them will. Yet, when i read these people’s statements, i can’t help but wonder if their inability to put things into perspective is the reason why they’re having so many development-related problems in the first place. Blindly following a certain development style and going to far with it without truly understanding the pro’s and con’s is a recipe for disaster. I don’t think it’s too far fetched to claim that this industry has about 40 years of historical data to back up that statement.
The thing about all of these styles is that they all have some merit (some arguably more than others), but none of them is a silver bullet. Not one of them will truly solve all of the problems you might face in software development. You know what does help in most cases? A little bit of common sense. You don’t really need to follow everything the ‘cool kids’ in the software development community say. Half of them aren’t truthful and another 30% (give or take) don’t really know what the hell they’re talking about and just want be considered ‘cool’ as well. It’s kinda like high school really.
Are you trying to improve the quality of the software you deliver? By all means, investigate each and every one of the popular approaches. Start applying parts of them that may start improving your situation in the short term. Take small steps. Don’t go overboard. Keep doing this as you gradually try to remove whatever it is that is making things more difficult than they need to be. In the end, you might end up with a mix of various pieces and parts of various development styles. And you know what? That’s ok. There’s nothing wrong with that. Nobody ever said that you have to follow a certain development style to the letter if you really want to solve your problems. And if the approach i just outlined solved your problems (or parts of them), then really, what is the problem?
February 10th, 2009 at 10:20 pm
I can agree with most of that. But neither DDD, TTD or SOLID are that new to the programming world, they just seem a bit newer to the .Net world.
It’s just that most people don’t think outside of the box enough and they stick to wath seems easy and works and of course to the millions of examples they find on the net.
February 10th, 2009 at 11:09 pm
I’ve poked fun at a few of the in vogue acroynms in my blog. DDd getting the biggest reaction.
But even if you read some of the over hyped writings in blogland surrounding something as non revolutionary as solid, I just don’t get it. Solid represents some good engineering principles, not the key to the success of your application.
I’ve recently seen one guy saying code without tests is the spawn of Satan. Tdd is great but I get most out of it with respect to design. You need to somehow get the experience to write and maintain a test suite and again it is no key to success.
Lean I simply cannot take serious on any level.
February 11th, 2009 at 3:48 pm
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