radical revamping of techpubs

[John Posada]

> I've seen XP happening in a number of companies that are now 
> dead.  Think of it as evolution in action.

I've also seen companies that do not use Agile go out of business, so
maybe Agile is not what drove them out of business.

> XP and Agile are excuses for bad behavior.  "We're manly 
> men who code brilliantly; we don't need documentation 
> because our code is perfect and if the users don't understand 
> our godlike design, that's their problem."  XP and Agile will 
> get code out the door and it may even be good code (occasionally),
> but it ignores the idea that 90% of programming is maintenance...
> and without internal documentation or process, you have no history.

Nothing is going to be all go with no bad...it's a balancing act.

The primary purpose of Agile is instead of develop, develop, develop,
develop, develop, show customer, crap-got it wrong, 

You develop, show customer, modify, develop, show customer, modify,
develop, show customer, modify, present to customer "Hey!, it's
exactly what I want.

As far as documentation, NOTHING in Agile has any impact on the
amount of deliverable documentation (user guides, help, etc). It's
all geared toward developer documentation, and even then, the idea is
not documentation that's not needed. If a document is really needed,
it stays. 

> our godlike design, that's their problem."  XP and Agile will 
> get code out the door and it may even be good code (occasionally),

My company is embracing Agile. Is it working? Who knows. I do know
this. As a company, we run a number of dashboards that give progress
status. Since we embraced Agile, the number of software bugs has
started to decline while the number of customers is climbing. Who
knows what it's due to, but it's heading in the right direction.



John Posada
Senior Technical Writer

"They say everyone needs goals. Mine is to live forever.
So far, so good."