A Person, Artist, Software Engineer, Geologist.

I have found that I'm am getting picky on what I take time to learn these days.  I have only so many hours in a day that I can devote to learning that I've gotten real choosy on what to focus on. When I decide to learn something new I need to create a "real" product out of it to completely understand what I'm learning.  I tend to focus on products or technology that, for me, I view as having a long term impact on my knowledge, career or interest.  A couple of these technologies have been JSF (Java Server Faces) iPad iOS development.  Very different technologies but the method of my learning is about the same.  It kinda of goes like this: Get excited. Try to develop a product with this technology. Fail (because of my lack of understanding). Stop and learn why I failed. Try again and Succeed. I did this with both JSF and iOS (iPad).  I (falsely) believe that just because I have a zillion years of experience that I can just pick up new technology and...

It's the topic that stirs much emotion in the software development field. Being in the field for 30+ years I've had the opportunity to be involved with many different types of development methodologies with Agile only being the latest among them. Each of them have aspects that are shared but may be implemented differently in different phases of the development lifecycle and Agile is no different. The need to gather and understand the customers requirements, the need to track progress during coding and to verify the operational aspects of the work thus far. All of these aspects exist in different methodologies to different degrees. My personal perspectives on Agile are: It’s not the holy grail of development methodologies.  It tries to instill from a process what good concerned developers should already contain and just using a different process will not over come developers ill suited for a project.  It tries to instill a mantra that could be perceived as “somewhat” of ...