Jake Watkins

I am a Consultant software developer and work for NCR. I can be contacted at mailto:John.Watkins@ncr.com.

A bit of background:

I develop software for the Windows NT platform. I make heavy use of COM(+), C++, VBScript (I hate VB though), Java. The software I write is mostly for the retail industry, ecommerce, and B2B.

Religious wars over OSes bore the heck out of me and usually cause me to flip the bozo bit for people who persistantly wage them.

Why I'm "contributing" to Extreme Programming:

I came to Extreme Programming after a long journey down what I refer to now as Battalion strength programming. I believe that CMM, ISO9000, and most other academic type software development methodologies tend to favor battalion strength programming. What I like about BSP (battalion strength programming) is the orderliness of the idea, each person has a place and a specific function. On paper it appears that way though, in fact as you read SEI's CMM documents you can close your eyes and hear the drum and bugle corp playing the Marine Corp hymn and you can see the little programmers marching in formation :). In school and when I first started work I believed that this would eventually lead to the Silver Bullet that Fred Brooks warns us about.

For various reasons I now consider myself to be a guerrilla programmer. Instead of solving problems by massing huge resources and people, why not try to think things out first and factor the problem down to pieces that a few people can handle instead?

No methodology is a silver bullet. None are going to allow us to write million line programs in a few days. But perhaps the methodology could be used to keep us from having to write million line programs in the first place.

Finally I would like to say ThankYou to the people who host this web-site. It has provided me with a great deal of information that has made me rethink things. I hope it does the same for others.

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