Development Methodologies?

Hi Damien,

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If I were to list projects as small, medium, and large or small to enterprise, what methodologies work across them? My thoughts are Agile works well, but eventually you’ll hit a wall of complexity, which will make you wonder why you didn’t see it many, many iterations ago. I don’t know anyone at NASA or Space-X or DoD so I don’t know what software methodology they use? Given your experience can you shed some light on it?

Regards,

Douglas

I don’t really use a specific methodology, however I find it very useful to understand the most popular methodologies and when they are useful. Then it’s helpful when you are at various stages of projects and know what kinds of approaches are helpful, and how you can apply them to your situation.

For example, I find Test Driven Design (TDD) very much overkill, but for a mature codebase I find lots of testing invaluable. Early in a codebase I find lots of tests very restrictive, I value the ability to quickly change a lot of code without also having to change a larger amount of tests. Early on, when I’m creating the overall architecture that everything else will hang on, and the code is small and design is plastic and I can keep it all in my head, I value being able to move very quickly. However, other developers may find TDD very valuable to think through the design and problems. I don’t work like that. To each his own.

Blindly applying methodologies or even “best practices” is bad. For the inexperienced it’s better than nothing, but it’s not as good as knowledge of self and team, experience with a variety of projects and their stages, and good old-fashioned pragmatism.