Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

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I agree with a chunk of this, especially the dislike for magical frameworks, but you're wrong to pick on Lean and YAGNI there.

YAGNI (You Ain't Gonna Need It) in specific comes from Extreme Programming, which is big on engineering discipline. E.g., its inclusion of Test-Driven Development and Pair Programming as practices. YAGNI isn't used there to reduce quality; it's used to reduce product complexity by only building features that are demonstrably necessary. Which, in my experience, helps with quality.

As to Lean, it's rooted in Lean Manufacturing, which comes from Toyota. An engineering-driven company, they used Lean techniques to reach quality levels way higher than competing car manufacturers, which gave them an enormous competitive advantage.

If people are using those terms to justify shipping crap, then they're doing it wrong.

>YAGNI (You Ain't Gonna Need It) in specific comes from Extreme Programming, which is big on engineering discipline

How is extreme programming even remotely related to engineering discipline? It is a bunch of randomly tossed together practices with no proven value or efficacy, pitched by people who were incapable of doing the job themselves, to teach other people how to do the job. YAGNI is controversial at best, and often creates far bigger problems that what it was intended to solve. And that is when it is combined with the rest of the rituals it was intended to work with. On its own it isn't even recommended by the people who made it up.

>As to Lean, it's rooted in Lean Manufacturing

The name is anyways, but that seems to be about it. Lean manufacturing was about eliminating things that don't add value for the customer. The lean fad in software development seems to be most often applied by people who can't even tell you who their customer might be, much less what adds value for them.

>If people are using those terms to justify shipping crap, then they're doing it wrong

If processes rarely work and any failure is dismissed as "you're doing it wrong", then your processes are worthless. This is "any failure can be attributed to you not following our religion correctly" thing is one of the major things that killed XP.

Regarding Extreme Programming: works for me. Sorry you couldn't make it work for you.

Regarding the Lean fad, yes, all fads in software are shallow and foolish. I'm not interested in taking responsibility for shallow idiots, so if you'd like to yell at somebody about that, seek elsewhere.

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