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Posted on November 17th, 2006 in Methodology, Agile by siddharta || No Comment
This post by Dmitri kicked off a mini-debate about agility and rigidity. The debate is about whether a developer should be interrupted for a day to perfrom some side job. Check out the posts linked above for the whole story.
This is a common enough issue that it requires further examination.
At the root of the issue is what I call the flexibility-efficiency dilemma. This tradeoff is, in fact, at the root of many issues of agile vs traditional processes. The essence is that if you want more flexibility, you trade in less efficiency and vice versa.
The Apgar score is a method used to determine the health of a baby at childbirth. The baby is scored between 0–2 on five factors: heart rate, breathing, muscle tone, skin irritability and skin colour, giving a total score between 0–10. The score is measured once at 1 minute after birth and again at 5 minutes after birth. A score of 7 or more is a healthy baby. Less than seven does not necessarily indicate an unhealthy baby, but doctors will look at the baby to be sure. Before the score was devised, determining the baby’s state was a complex mass of subjective measures which often meant that the baby was not given treatment when required because some factor was overlooked.