Re: How to get Ada to ?cross the chasm??

["Dan'l Miller" <optikos@verizon.net>]

On Wednesday, May 16, 2018 at 11:58:01 AM UTC-5, Jeffrey R. Carter wrote:
> On 05/15/2018 11:32 PM, Randy Brukardt wrote:
> > 
> > Surely, bad management is possible with any programming style! And following
> > some programming technique slavishly without understanding why is clearly
> > the mark of bad management.
> 
> Yes, and the technique they followed slavishly included "shut up and start 
> coding". And it was named Agile.

Yikes!  It sounds like they missed the whole point of Agile:  to get stakeholders actually *talking* to each other (verbally in person, respectfully), instead of blindly throwing something over the cubicle walls at each other that was banged out on the keyboard heads down shut-up.

(I cannot say at all that I am a fervent advocate of Agile in all of its overhyped incarnations.  I especially detest the pairing-of-personnel in Extreme Programming.  The replacement of iterations of well-spoken well-thought-out requirements documents with “stories” on 3"x5" cards seems sophomoric and infantile, and a clear invitation to misinterpretation but then later a defiant attitude “I've got it right here in writing on a 3x5 card” (intentionally cryptically tersely, but we'll just ignore those defects).  But worse, the switch from engineering language to newspaper language (e.g., “stories”; publishing-esque daily deadlines; programmers as journalists interviewing the user to get take-aways/the-scoop) sends our fading-profession further down the road of newspaper hacks, from whence the term hacker in tech culture actually historically derives, both linguistically and semantically.  But all that being said, Agile was supposed to get stakeholders actually speaking verbally to each other, not shut-up and bang away blindly on the keyboard.)

Tying this back to getting Ada to cross the chasm, Ada's nearly-user-readable lucid syntax is actually anathema to the newspaper-hack mentality of Agile zealots, because mere-mortal users are not supposed to be allowed into the inner-sanctum of the sacred newspaper to see how the sausage is made.  Only high-priest bona-fide journalists are allowed into the freedom-of-speech's inner-sanctum at the newspaper, who decides what is & isn't speech and what may be freely said in that speech.  The same with Agile journalist-programmers harshly interpreting the terse crypto-speak on the 3"x5" cards that were taken as journalist's notes during the journalist's interview/press-conference with the user.  If users could lucidly read Ada source code or a textual requirements document (instead of, say, C++ crypto-syntax and C++'s vast amounts of implicit compiler-generated subtle activity in the subtext of the C++ source code that never distinctly occupies even a single overt ASCII character of C++ source code), then any mere-mortal user could have the newspaper's sacrosanct freedom of speech.  And users actually understanding source code just isn't allowed in newspaper-journalist-esque Agile.  Users are only supposed to see the newspaper/program that was published the next day/week based on the 3x5-card journalistic notes in the user-interview/press-conference, and then users are brow-beaten to complain only around the edges about small matters, and then only in ways that cannot be refuted by “Oh yeah?  Well, you said the opposite on this 3x5 card!”

Conversely, Microsoft's pre-Agile form of agile can be thought of as Scrum-cells rethought, where program management are movie directors directing the production of a movie, dynamically forming go-forth-&-prosper scrum-cells/cross-functional-teams to go forth and devise a practical solution to each topic-problem in a short time-duration bringing back their proposed solutions to the movie director's yea or nay, then the personnel are reallocated every few hours or every few days to a different scrum-cell to solve a new problem pursuant to making-the-movie/writing-the-program.  As it turns out, writing software and movie-making are very similar, whereas, in hyped Agile, newspapers don't resemble software development much at all other than having a keyboard to typewrite on.  And I have witnessed this software-development-as-movie-directing variant actually work quite well at high velocity at 2 employers.