A late start

Ok, I've finally stopped stalling on the creation of this blog for CS460. I'm still not quite sure exactly what I should be putting here, so I guess I'll just do brain spew for anything class-related.

To start off with, I'll give my thoughts on the book, Extreme Programming Installed, which I finished reading during the first few days of the semester. Having dipped into Extreme Programming in Dave Ackley's CS259 class, I was familiar with a fair amount of what was presented in this book. The only aspect that was really new to me was the interactions between the programming team and the customer. All of that seems pretty reasonable to me, but I can't really give a personal take on that, as so far I haven't done any work for customers, just assignments and personal projects.

I have to say, I greatly prefer the agile/XP approach to just about everything over the BDUF approach. Even in school projects I've noticed a big difference in speed and stress levels. Whenever I've tried to design everything (on paper or in my head) before doing any coding, I've invariably gotten to about 95%, then while tying the loose ends together, found out that some of the ends just plain won't tie up. 95% turns into 50%, the design has to be revised, sleep gets lost, maybe things become late, maybe they get turned in buggy.

I'm probably just terrible at actually doing the BDUF. But, every time I've mostly ignored the idea of design, just started coding one feature at a time, and been aggressive with my refactoring, everything's come together pretty quickly and pretty easily.