20 years old agility advices

Ecris le 17 juillet 2005
Dans la catégorie Uncategorized |

I was recently reading one of the online available books on the Stephane Ducasse web site: Smalltalk V 286 Tutorial from Digitalk Inc. The book has been published in 1986, and it is amazing by itself to see what was possible on such simple PC in those days, compared to the visual C. The book by itself is a very good tutorial, strongly advised if you plan to learn Smalltalk, or just programming. If you are more advanced, you could have a look to chapter 12.

Here is an extract from the conclusion:

Don’t over plan. Know enough to get going, then go. Smalltalk/V is designed to work with you in evolving, incremental process.
When re-working a copied method, edit the comment first. Then let the changes made to the comment point the way to lines in the method source code which implement those aspects of the method whose description in the comment has changed. And remember, comments are a critical means of communication among Smalltalk/V programmers.
Keep moving. Keep your productivity high by writing the “easy ones” first. Very often the act of writing other methods or incubating on a tough one will result in insights to conquer almost any Smalltalk/V programming problem.

A very nice piece of early agile concepts, isn’t?

Those advices are almost 20 years old. It’s time to apply them.

Social Bookmarking