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Posted by Deborah Hartmann Preuss on Jun 01, 2006
We human beings, so often capable of complex thought, paradoxically also long for something often called "simplicity". A well known example of deep reflection on the subject is Thoreau's "Walden", published in 1854, a social critique of the Western World examining aspects of humanity that needed to be either renounced or praised. But this tension is surely as old as man."Simplicity - the art of maximizing the amount of work not done - is essential"But the term is somehow deceptive - surely simplicity should be, well, simple?
"Technical skill is mastery of complexity, while creativity is mastery of simplicity."The Agile approach invites us to consider which of these is necessary at every moment: technical skill or creativity. Each is valuable in its own right, and when well balanced against one another and focused on customer goals, both can contribute to the creation of extraordinary business value.
Agile Development: A Manager's Roadmap for Success
Learning to be a Good Product Owner: Foundation Skills
Design in Agile, Software Craftsmanship, Product Development, Testing @ QCon London in March
VersionOne is recognized by Agile practitioners as the leader in Agile project management tools. Companies such as Adobe, BBC, CNN, Dow, HP, IBM, Sony and 3M have turned to VersionOne to help deliver greater value to their customers.
This is true in so many human endeavours, from writing a short story, to making an email concise, to making a software system 'simple'. It's often worth the effort, but it certainly isn't easy.
Take the famous Blaise Pascal quote:I have made this letter longer, because I have not had the time to make it shorter.
It takes EFFORT to keep things simple. It's easy to cut-n-paste your way to code-hell, it takes effort to identify opportunities for reuse and refactor out common code. At work a lot of what I do is to encapsulate the complexity of something we're trying to do so that the other team members can use what I've done to very simply solve similar problems over and over again.
Take for example XFire. There's a lot going on under the covers, and even understanding it and configuring it is too complex to have to do more than once. But now that it's configured, people on my team can just annotate their classes with an @WebService annotation and the bean will be automatically registered as a web service.
Don't let the term "simplicity" fool you. Simple != Easy.
Take the famous Blaise Pascal quote:
I have made this letter longer, because I have not had the time to make it shorter.
It takes EFFORT to keep things simple. Don't let the term "simplicity" fool you. Simple != Easy.
I can definitely sympathize with that. Take InfoQ.com for example, the UI was designed to be as simple as possible, but we had to jump through many hoops to get it that way... Even editorially, I spend a long time trying to write news items in as concise a way as possible, to make them as clear and easy to understand as I can. That takes a LOT of effort.
Brian Marick takes us through a quick tour of the most important values and challenges to adopting Agile successfully (they aren't the typical challenges and values we hear in the community).
The line between development and architecture is tricky. Does it exist at all? Is an ivory tower actually needed? There's a balance in the middle, but how do you move from developer to architect?
The word 'authority' sometimes produces an allergic response in hard-line agilists. Freedom and authority – both are bad if misused and both are good if used in right spirit for a noble cause.
"Getting Started with Grails" brings you up to speed on this modern web framework. Companies as varied as LinkedIn, Wired, and Taco Bell are all using Grails. Are you ready to get started as well?
Those familiar with only ITIL V2 often scoff at the thought that ITIL could serve as a governance framework for SOA. With ITIL V3, the focus of the framework shifted towards service-orientation.
SpringSource CTO Adrian Colyer discusses AspectJ, SpringSource's dm Server and tc Server products, OSGi and Scrum.
Heroku's Adam Wiggins talks about Rails, Background Jobs, Add-Ons, Ruby, and how Heroku manages to work around Ruby's inefficiencies using Erlang and other languages.
For Grady Booch the foundation of a good architecture is patterns, SOA being just one of many patterns. In this Second Life presentation, Booch attempts to bring more clarity on what architecture is.
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