> I now routinely get involved with projects developed by one or two people burdened with so much process and “best practices” that almost nothing of real value is produced.
The problem is that nobody really knows what practices are best, anyway. It's mostly just following the herd and gold-plating.
A story I typically trot out at this point is some code that was written in Fortran. I passed a meeting room one day, where some consulting dude was talking about "yeah, we could just put that in xml."
The thing about Fortran is that it can read arrays as a one-line statement. It's native to the language. You put data in XML, then you need to link in libraries and parse the whole shebang.
Programs need to be revised periodically. That means a bunch of guys who know what they're doing (not necessarily programmers) have to sit down and go through the tedious business of figuring out a new spec and how things need to change. I don't there's any shortcut to this. XML won't magic the problem away.
The problem is that nobody really knows what practices are best, anyway. It's mostly just following the herd and gold-plating.
A story I typically trot out at this point is some code that was written in Fortran. I passed a meeting room one day, where some consulting dude was talking about "yeah, we could just put that in xml."
The thing about Fortran is that it can read arrays as a one-line statement. It's native to the language. You put data in XML, then you need to link in libraries and parse the whole shebang.
Programs need to be revised periodically. That means a bunch of guys who know what they're doing (not necessarily programmers) have to sit down and go through the tedious business of figuring out a new spec and how things need to change. I don't there's any shortcut to this. XML won't magic the problem away.