I just started working on a new contract as a Web application developer. After working on several “Agile” software projects, I am back on a very non-Agile project.

It is interesting how important concepts in software development get interpreted and implemented by different people. For example, I was told that I should avoid running the unit-tests for the Web applications because they were not designed to be maintained after the feature was done being written. WOW! What a horrible approach to testing. It’s like they read the book on unit-testing, but they skipped over the chapter that explained the concepts behind having regression capbilities.

I had to explain the benefit of maintaining library dependencies in the repository. They were maintaining third-party libraries on a shared network drive. The main argument was that they didn’t want the repository to get too big, where too big was several hundred megs. After making a convincing argument about hard-drives being cheap and the many problems that can occur when you don’t version control your libraries with your source, they agreed to let me fix the problem.

The developers tend to approach everything from a data perspective rather than from a feature perspective. I sat through a requirement meeting for which the outcome was to go and hammer out a database schema that would provide the necessary tables for the application. They were literally conversing with the customer in terms of what data should be present in the database.

The development team has four people besides me. I would wager that even if they doubled their team size to ten, they wouldn’t half as productive as a team of four (good) agile developers who did TDD, continuous integration, and short-term iterative development.