I told Steve today that I had been really agonizing over this post and had started it many times but wasn't sure I could word it in ways that I could express what I would like people to understand and take from this post. So here goes and maybe it will make some sense-). I asked a rhetorical question back in a previous post where I said, " Also, I ponder whether Agile or Extreme Programing development and "Continuous Architecture" and relentless continuous delivery of business value functionality every single week ever really allows time to build adequate framework level stuff like this (logging, etc)." It was a rhetorical question because I already know the answer having been there when we came up Extreme Programming in the 90's. As someone pointed out in my comments, that dogmatic answer is the canonical "Infrastructure Phase" at the "beginning" of the XP project and to a lesser extent, the mystical " System Metaphor " that we deempasize these days. My experience in the 90's with the XP community was that they were not the world's biggest fans of Architecture and most notably Software Architects . These topics realize perhaps a bias especially with topics like ArchitectsDontCode . At first glance, we got that right. You have to remember that a lot of us were reacting strongly against debacles like CMM and ISO9000 that threatened to take down further software projects in a sea of bindered documentation and hierarchical organizations with the uber ChiefArchitect . For the most part, we were all right about this as, after all, The Source Code Is the Design , not those huge UML Rational Rose diagrams that we churning out that produced zero value but were check-off items in some big process list. Models have no use unless they are essentially are Code Is Model . I learned, kicking and screaming at first, to let go of all those useless things I could not explain why I was doing and focusing on delivering business
Read More...