Wednesday, October 8, 2008

Microsoft completely miss the point of Agile Development?

Slightly annoyed about a post in CIO about Visual Studio 2010. The contents of the article is not so interesting, but a user comment annoyed me.

"Microsoft, unfortunately, continues to show that they in fact completely miss the point of agile software development. Agility is about simplicity of design, of process, of feedback mechanisms. It is also about open, community-based tools, frameworks, and standards. MS keeps offering hilariously bloated, complex, monolithic, closed, and expensive IDE "solutions" that worsen every problem they attempt to solve. Visual Studio is now, at more than 43 million lines of code (and counting), so counter to agile development practices that I must question its architects' sanity or motives. Is all of this bureaucratic bloat forced upon the VS team by clueless marketing drones? That might explain the continuing madness."

This guy has just completely missed the point. A few things:

Agile = open, community-based tools, frameworks, and standards.
Why?? Agile is (a lot more than this, but also is) about using agile methodologies and practices to drive a project to success. Any software that can help in this endavour is great, but all I care about is using the best software. Whether it is Microsoft or Thoughtworks that delivers my CI system is unimportant to me, as long as I get to make the choice. I can use an open source IDE, CI, source control, build tool, test tool, etc. if I want to (and I often do), and that's all that matters.

MS keeps offering hilariously bloated, complex, monolithic, closed, and expensive IDE "solutions" that worsen every problem they attempt to solve.
Dude, Visual Studio is a great tool! Together with Resharper it really is a tool that rocks :)

That might explain the continuing madness
Keep up the madness! I, for one, can't wait to see what comes next.

Admittedly Microsoft wants as big a part of the pie as possible, and that can certainly lead to situations that is less than optimal, but just because everything isn't good about Microsoft certainly doesn't make everything wrong.

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