Agile development vs BDUF

My old pal Phil has whipped up a storm again! This time he is taking on Joel Spolsky.

Joel believes in using BDUF (Big Design Up Front) software development where Phil believes in using Agile Development. While for the most part I agree with Phil, but there are times where BDUF totally makes sense.

What we’ve done at our company with great success is take a bit from both and add our own jelly on top. Before any development is done, we create a throw away prototype that the user can get their hands on. Once they agree to the basic design, we’ll go ahead and spec it out and create the database. We rarely do UML unless the project is HUGE.

The one thing that we did when I worked at a company with Phil was UML the hell out of everything. I hated this and I swear we wasted more time on this then actually developing the application. That’s probably why I ended up leaving. (Besides a few other thing that I really don’t want to go into. And no, Phil has nothing to do with me leaving!!)

One of the features we are beginning to use while in development is to create up a wiki for the team to leave documentation, notes, connection strings and who knows what else. So far this has been a huge sucess. I want to take this to the next level with the project management aspect and put our weekly status notes in there or better yet create a blog for this. There is has to be some real value in using a blog!!!