MADJUG meeting

I went over to the MADJUG meeting tonight to check out "The Art of Agility and the Agile Unified Process (AUP)", with Sinan Si Alhir tonight.

Si compared the 'agile revolution' to the 'object oriented revolution' in the 80s-90s. Stating that agile principles and concepts will serve a similar purpose, overhauling the way that sofware development is approached - and I suppose for many of us, this is already taking place.

I have recently received my first dose of 'real world' exposure in a serious RUP shop and it's been quite eye opening, largely due to the raw amount of documentation being generated. I quite enjoyed hearing Si discuss that RUP done properly (still talking RUP, not AUP) does not require all of these documents and in many cases not even most of them. Instead a more 'common sense' strategy should be applied, generating documents that either aid the creation of a working end product or provide meaningful documentation for those that will maintain the system (or required documentation for gov't bodies, etc).

When you take a step back and look at it, it does appear to be 'common sense', but it's pretty simple to glaze over and just start generating documentation for documentation-sake when you're faced with a checklist. Especially when that checklist ends with a line for your signature and (gasp) that of your superior's boss, or something to that effect.