Thursday, March 18, 2010

We Still Need Cathedrals

In The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Eric Steven Raymond promotes more agile, open collaboration-style software development methods as superior to traditional managed approaches. He shoots down any counterarguments to that thesis one at a time. Being an entry-level software developer for BYU Risk Management, I have seen the two approaches mix, and I've seen both of them cause long, miserable software deaths as well as rapidly built, sleek, easy-to-use products. Agile and open development using more minds outside of Risk Management or the Office of Information Technology would have saved us hundreds, even thousands of dollars on missed design details and bugs. On the other hand, outside motivation to collaborate on BYU projects is not easy to find. Our projects largely concern and benefit only BYU Campus—it's why our department is here, after all. So on campus, we need a largely "cathedral" approach, but with the kind of focused, productive laziness my expert co-workers exhibit. This laziness efficiently finds a way to do the least work and get the most results, which is good for everyone involved. We succeed at our software development jobs on campus when we combine a looser cathedral structure with a bazaar attitude (pun intended).

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