From: Avdi Grimm Date: 2008-08-18T23:23:42+09:00 Subject: Re: BDD and TDD - What are they for? On Mon, Aug 18, 2008 at 10:01 AM, Eleanor McHugh wrote: > From what I've seen of BDD and TDD in practice, they focus a lot of effort > into making the teams of horses as close a match to those the man wants as > possible so as to achieve incredibly high satisfaction ratings: they're thus > an excellent marketing technique. However what the man fundamentally needs > is a more effective ploughing solution that costs him less money, and > figuring that out requires a broader perspective than that provided by > just-in-time requirements analysis. I think you may be conflating two different scenarios. There's the scenario where a customer knows approximately what they want, and an agile team can help them triangulate in on exactly what they need with a minimum of wasted effort. Then there's the scenario where someone who has worked in a particular domain for awhile realizes that things could be done in a much better way, and starts a project to implement it. Often, this is someone who has worked on several teams such as previously described. In this case, the visionary, not the projected end-user, is the "customer", at least in initial development. If all goes well, and they hire a good marketing team, the visionary and her team then convince their end-users that what they REALLY want is this revolutionary product. This goes a lot easier if the team in question is already well known and respected for their *evolutionary* work in the same field. I would submit that when a customer hires you to build them a better plow, you should build them a better plow. However, once you have done that a few times you are in an excellent position to go off for six months and innovate a new hydroponic gardening system and sell it to your existing customers. -- Avdi Home: http://avdi.org Developer Blog: http://avdi.org/devblog/ Twitter: http://twitter.com/avdi Journal: http://avdi.livejournal.com