Erik Price
Posts: 39
Nickname: erikprice
Registered: Mar, 2003
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Re: Tracer Bullets and Prototypes
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Posted: May 1, 2003 5:06 AM
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> Instead, the tracer bullet analogy says, > "Let's try and produce something really early on that we > can actually give to the user to see how close we will be > to the target. As time goes on, we can adjust our aim > slightly by seeing where we are in relation to our user's > target."
As described in this interview segment, using "tracer bullets" (rough working code that implements a requested feature) is a good way to get early warning of changes that the client may wish to make in the final product. From what I understand, frequent meetings with the client to show the current working software is a tenet of agile software development. But, earlier in this interview series ("Orthogonality and the DRY Principle"), Hunt & Thomas recommend taking such steps as building a code generator, or taking care of some infrastructural issue early so that it does not become a problem later.
I'm not arguing with either approach, but it seems that these two recommendations are fundamentally at odds. In agile software development on the one hand, the idea is "don't build something until you need it, because you probably won't need it, or even if you do, it might be different than you expect". This makes a lot of sense. But the earlier recommendation of anticipating what will be needed and building a solution ahead of time also seems to make a lot of sense -- yet these two approaches seem mutually exclusive. What do you think?
(I'm not asking this to be belligerent; I'm genuinely curious about this since I read about agile programming in Robert Martin's book at the same time that I read the "Orthogonality and the DRY Principle" interview, and was struck by what appeared to be a conflict in the two. If I'm wrong, please don't hesitate to explain how. :)
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