2 March 2010, Enterprise Software Development Conference, San Mateo
This is a new, small conference that appears to be replacing the Software Development Expo, which I usually attend. The expo floor was interesting, because all of the tool makers were talking about the agile development process for software development. Hopefully the waterfall process is GONE!
The keynote speaker was really the one that brought me out. This was Kent Beck, who wrote thae book on “Extreme Programming”, a precursor to “Agile.” Kent was talking about something different, about how humans do design.
He refers to something called “responsive design”, which is between predictive and reactive. He defines design as “beneficially relating elements.” He lists four strategies for designing in a new feature to software:
1) a. if you can see the solution, then you can just take the leap and implement it. This is easiest.
1) b. If you can see the solution, you might want to implement the solutin in a parallel product (codebase) , and support two designs at the same time for a while.
2) a. If you can’t see the solution, then you might want to make a tool that will make experimentation with different solutions easier. This is called “stepping stone.”
2) b. If you can’t see the solution, you might want to simplify the problem, deliberately ignore a lot of requirements.
Kent was also talking about electricity. He said that over the lifetime of a server, you’ll spend as much $$ on electricity as you did on buying the server. The cost of computing is becoming significant again. Cragslist measures page views per kilowatt hour of electricity.
