Journal Article - The Coffee House - An Agile Excursion

The just-released July 2004 edition of The JavaRanch Journal includes an article by Solveig Haugland, "The Coffee House - An Agile Excursion".

Please use this thread to comment on and discuss the article.

Great story - it saved my day!

Cute story - especially the part about finding a something at Wal-Mart for $49.99 which fit all the customer requirements!

Unfortunately they left out the punch line, which is the mass layoff the subsequent Friday!

Originally posted by Don Stadler:
Unfortunately they left out the punch line, which is the mass layoff the subsequent Friday!

Didn't you hear? There was no layoff at all, as the customer was so pleased with the clever solution, he decided to do their new high profit project with them, too - instead of with the other big company, which always seemed to waste so much time and money on cabinets of documentation for system noone liked to use, anyway...

Originally posted by Ilja Preuss:

Didn't you hear? There was no layoff at all, as the customer was so pleased with the clever solution, he decided to do their new high profit project with them, too - instead of with the other big company, which always seemed to waste so much time and money on cabinets of documentation for system noone liked to use, anyway...

Let's see. The customer kept all of the 42 Javaranch contractors during the inception of the new project? Presumably all of them had a hand in the project definition document. Which must have been interesting to read!

Meanwhile back at headquarters, the customer's boss was getting wined and dined by representatives of AccenXXXX, KXXG (or is that Breaking Point?), HAL Global Consulting, all of whom conclusively proved that the $49.99 solution was worthless. The customer was transferred to run operations in Ulan Bator and new management was brought on to clean things up......

Don, I think I am not getting your point. Could you please explain? Thanks!

Ilja, I've been working too long in highly-politicized places and have become slightly cynical about such things. I used to work for a 'Big 5' IT consultantcy in Europe and have seen them at work many times. Big-company politics can be an interesting thing. The customer is usually extremly risk-averse. So much so that the usual behavior is to hire the same old hacker IT consultantcy (aka clowns) to fail in the same old way rather than take the risk of allowing someone to do something new (like Agile methods).

You (the client manager I mean) don't get fired when Accenture fails but you can get fired if you entrust a big project to an untried group doing xP. Easily. Not least because of the Big Five partners whispering in the ears of your management that your successful project really failed.

This is why I think xP will work better in smaller client organizations and inside software development companies. Not because the politics are necessarily less poisonous but because it's easier to take a risk in some of these places.

Ah, ok - thanks for the clarification! My experience is mainly with small companies...