Agile Discussion on StackOverflow
As I mentioned the other day, Jeff Atwood from Coding Horror is building a site called StackOverflow for programmers to ask and answer questions. So far it looks really good. Unfortunately you can’t see it right now since it’s in private beta but they’re supposed to be launching Real Soon Now. There’s a good question about Getting Started with Agile & TDD, Pair Programming and others. Good stuff.
When it does launch, I’m really looking forward to seeing the discussions around Agile. Jeff is somewhat deluded (or maybe just in denial) about how the site is actually going to be used, which is for discussions. He wants it to be about “Ask a question” then “Get an answer”. In reality, lots of questions don’t lend themselves to One True Answer. This is really true in the Agile world. I can tell you how I do things but it’s not the True Answer and it might not work for you. But in that case, I want to know what didn’t work for you so I’ll learn something. The site lets you have wiki-like functionality for correcting answers and questions to hopefully make them living documents, not the stale 3-versions-old answers you typically find when searching for technical questions. To me this lends itself to discussions but who knows how it’ll work in the real world. Hopefully Jeff will come around and accept how the site is actually used rather than how he wants it to work, rather than quashing the real behavior like he seems to want to based on what he says in the StackOverflow podcast.
So once the site launches, I’m looking forward to seeing a lot of good Agile Q&A and discussion there.
When it does launch, I’m really looking forward to seeing the discussions around Agile. Jeff is somewhat deluded (or maybe just in denial) about how the site is actually going to be used, which is for discussions. He wants it to be about “Ask a question” then “Get an answer”. In reality, lots of questions don’t lend themselves to One True Answer. This is really true in the Agile world. I can tell you how I do things but it’s not the True Answer and it might not work for you. But in that case, I want to know what didn’t work for you so I’ll learn something. The site lets you have wiki-like functionality for correcting answers and questions to hopefully make them living documents, not the stale 3-versions-old answers you typically find when searching for technical questions. To me this lends itself to discussions but who knows how it’ll work in the real world. Hopefully Jeff will come around and accept how the site is actually used rather than how he wants it to work, rather than quashing the real behavior like he seems to want to based on what he says in the StackOverflow podcast.
So once the site launches, I’m looking forward to seeing a lot of good Agile Q&A and discussion there.