Thursday, August 14, 2008

Please take a look at this presentation, this guy from RailsEnvy make you laugh and learn a lot at the same time.

http://www.railsenvy.com/2007/3/22/ruby-on-rails-video-presentation

In my opinion the most amazing thing in the video is the comparative between Adaptive and Predictive software development, and he's right, all developers working in fixed price projects have to deal / fight with clients about improvements and non planned things.

Another true statement is that you can never estimate (guess) how much time the project will take, doesn't matter how much experience you think you have in that area. This is because development processes are living things, there are no sure things, clients change their opinions all the time.

With the Agile technique, implemented in the way this guy explains in the video, make developers go from "Hmmm, that's kind of difficult to do, i don't know if I can do that quickly" (because you're thinking in that moment that you're not going to get paid for that improvement, which is true) to "Yeah, awesome idea, let's try that and see how it looks" (because you know his idea is fine and you don't care how much time it takes, you know you're going to get paid for that too).

In a nutshell, I think this guy is trying to say, get paid hourly and not for a fixed price.