I'm looking at this question from a perspective of project management. While one article that I read a couple of days ago, brings up cons in the "agile" workflows, this other article on the other hand, basically calls the people who are not able to advance over time (agreed it cites a TDD example) whiners ... not sure if it is somehow directed towards people who can't pickup agile.
Which side do you take?
I am also interested in getting generic answers to this question. What do you feel is wrong in the current arena of Software Development?
Since my first answer was given when only the headline did exist and obviously I got enough free time during my morning coffee ... I want to retry an answer with this context :)
First of all the agile manifesto is just a bunch of suggestions, the problem was that bosses don't like change and technicians most of the time suck transporting their ideas to the business-sector so we needed marketing and marketing does not build solutions it builds religions .... so now we have made up terms and conferences about made up terms and not the team who actually needs to work with the tools gets to choose but the ceo enforces things like scrum .....
which very often leads to: https://imgflip.com/i/191xkq
But the ideas of the agile manifesto are great and even if you don't practise them all you should reflect upon them on regular bases and pick the ones who actually help you.
TDD is cool it's just not always practical, I use tests to reflect about the code I wrote that's the main reason I write tests ... I want to improve myself.
And one important Thing is f*cked up .... their has been a distortion of reality for the business and I personal just blame greed and stupidity .... I guess someone planted the legend of the uber-dev somewhere. The dev who actually rocks, in my opinion the lvl of narcissism has to be rather advanced that you think you're so awesome.
We all suck that's the truth, we suck out of different reasons. Often we don't get the time to solve problem, or we code before we read, and so on but if you think your code is great .... just f*cking read in 5 years ... if it's still great there are 3 possibilities
1: you didn't evolve (bad) 2: you have clearly and ego problem (also bad) 3: you are as awesome as you think and ahead of your time (most unlikely scenario -> reflect with other people! but even than it's bad because it's likely no one else understands you.)
..... anyhow :) this is a more generic opinion on the subtext :) but my girlfriend waits for her coffee ;) maybe some of you agree
We have too many tools (git, bower, npm, yeoman etc)for our work flows!
As a developer, we ignore the value of our own time and always seem to devalue ourselves.
All those extra unpaid hours at work for what?!
Neglecting that content is king. There are so many people doing awesome stuff and they end up filling their awesome stuff with lorem ipsum (or something equally as pointless), because they have no story to tell. I would love for some of the great developers to build a site around a great story and not around a new framework (in journalism they say: "let's snowfall this thing!").
Trying to force usage of a language/framework to fit it in every situation, instead of understanding that often one kind of job has its preferred tool.
I'd love to see us all start again - languages, frameworks, ideals and conventions etc. I'm looking at you javascript!
based on what metrics ? we're humans, so basically we're making all the mistakes all other groups are doing as well ....
we mistake necessity with importance
we project blame instead of solving the problem
.......
and these are just my opinions .... everyone else got other perspectives and how do you measure it ? what metrics can u use ? i guess you could analyze all the answers....
this is a sociological / psychological question in my opinion and most of us do not have the education or the statistical evidence to substantiate any claim and even if some of us have it this topic should be answered by outsiders observing us and collecting data not by us.
Or we think that if we don't work those extra hours unpaid, we might lose the job/client and who wants to go out interviewing? That's worse that working the unpaid hours!
stuff ;)
Steve Taylor
Software Engineer
We're still programming in text-based languages.