What Is The Water Strategy Ofa Fish
What Is The Water Strategy Ofa FishFish don't have a strategy for dealing with water, they are a strategy for dealing with water.
XP doesn't need an explicit strategy for dealing with risk, it is a strategy for dealing with risk, albeit one that causes you to ignore some risks (i.e. ones that you can't convince your customer to care about).
-- KentBeck, on the XpMailingList
WhiteHat: An ArgumentByAnalogy. Xp aggregates some risk strategies. The fishy stuff is a rhetorical device.
BlackHat: Stuff like this gives Xp advocates a bad reputation.
YellowHat: It's a quick way to explain XpAndRiskManagement.
GreenHat: I wonder how fish deal with risk? Or how Xp deals with water?
RedHat: Typical HandWaving. Rhetoric by CopyAndPaste: "what is the X strategy of a Y?"
BlueHat: When using the SixThinkingHats, please try to keep them balanced.
I wonder if Kent was intentionally referencing McLuhan's famous quote: "We don't know who discovered water, but we can be certain it wasn't a fish"?
"[Fish] are a strategy for dealing with water."
Oh, really? And what if my demand on the water is to drive the turbines in this tidal power station? Are fish the strategy for that, too?
No. They are a strategy, not the only one.
Fish aren't strategies. Create fish, use fish, buy fish, turn into fish might be strategies for various things. But if I ask someone for a plan of action and they say fish, they're either speaking nonsense or talking about catching them.
Agreed. It's like saying, "And what if my project really is just like my past projects and the specifications are all known up front, and it's a life-critical system, etc., etc." Well, in that case, you want a different strategy for risk, like the method they use for writing the software for the space shuttle.
Fish are a strategy that genes use to deal with water. Individual fish components address specific problems:
Likewise, XP is a strategy for dealing with risk. Individual components of XP deal with software development in the context of a risk-filled environment:
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