Guest Speaker Reaction

Introduction 

On Monday, Dave had a guest speaker come in. Jeff VanDyke, founder of VanDyke software and UNM alumni spoke about various aspects of the software development industry as they are practice by his company. Topics like, development methodology and business model were address during his topic. He also answered questions posed by the class and by Dave. His company uses extreme programming for implementing features. He also mention after class when I was asking him questions that they do emphasis testing code however they do not spend too much time dedicated specifically to writing tests for trivial functionality. He also mentioned that ideas are fleshed out in advance although formal specifications are not used. I thought the use of extreme programming and the lack of formal specifications were important enough that I am going to do a "define, defend, attack" analysis of them in how they relate..

Extreme programming: 

Define

An agile development strategy that emphasis short burst of feature implementation known as sprints. The idea is that this development technique is more adaptive to changing client demands.

Defend

Being a CS undergrad seems to breed agile developers. It feels that we are always on the grind and always having to be highly adaptive to our situation based on the work load our professors put on us. This has been especially true of this class the client meetings can be good or bad depending on what kind of demo we have.

Attack

This method of development  has been serving our team well in some respects, and if it used in industry, I imagine it will serve us well in the future. The disadvantage is that I imagine most of us are use to at least a semi formal specification of what needs to be achieved which we don't really have for this project. I have tried my best to define the scope of the project and a specification of features to be implemented however this model has had to adapt based on client meetings so it has been hard finding a balance.