A software developer by the name of Gustavo Duarte wrote something quite fascinating last month on Reality-Driven Development. Apparently, his writing drew many Slashdot readers to his humble blog.
In his post, Duarte draws from such disparate sources and ideas as physicist Richard Feynman’s thoughts on the Challenger disaster, natural selection, a linux discussion thread, the book Built to Last, and others to make his case for what he calls Reality-Driven Development.
Duarte says that “reality is invited in via experiments” and defines Reality-Driven Development thusly:
A good software development process should optimize experimentation and improve feedback from reality. This is what I mean by reality-driven development. And in software the most important realities are user experience and technical quality, while the primary experiments are working software and code.
He criticizes big up-front design:
And rigid upfront design is a sure way to a crappy code base or engineering disasters. Alistair Cockburn put it best: “With design I can think very fast, but my thinking is full of little holes.”
He also casts Agile development techniques in an interesting light:
There is no specific reality-driven methodology. The Agile principles have a lot in common with these ideas (and certainly influenced them), but the devil is in the details. I prefer to think of software engineering in terms of a toolbox, full of techniques we pick and choose for the right situation. Process tools for optimizing experimentation include iterative development, executable architecture, continuous integration, and unit testing.
It’s difficult to summarize all the juicy tidbits. Reading the entire post is well worth the time.
