in reply to Re^5: Beyond Agile: Subsidiarity as a Team and Software Design Principle
in thread Beyond Agile: Subsidiarity as a Team and Software Design Principle

So what you're saying is that projects such as going from remitting information in form ICD-9 to form ICD-10 in the healthcare and health insurance industry in the US should have involved no programming at all, because software developers should have foreseen the need to switch from a few hundred simple condition codes to several thousand codes in a new recursive data format? A new data format whose printed specification manual is over five inches thick and costs $1500?

If you're handling changes like that in a basic configuration file, then your powers of foresight are far beyond anyone in the entire healthcare industry. It was a months-long project most places to handle the new standard properly.

  • Comment on Re^6: Beyond Agile: Subsidiarity as a Team and Software Design Principle

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Re^7: Beyond Agile: Subsidiarity as a Team and Software Design Principle
by Your Mother (Archbishop) on Jul 30, 2015 at 20:18 UTC

    ++ just for mentioning ICD10. Bitten by turtle, spacecraft injury, injured at prison swimming pool... the most amusing of the boondoggles so far.

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Re^7: Beyond Agile: Subsidiarity as a Team and Software Design Principle
by chacham (Prior) on Jul 31, 2015 at 12:36 UTC

    going from remitting information in form ICD-9 to form ICD-10

    And Agile would have helped there? This has nothing to do with initial requirements during the design and coding phases which were implemented decades ago. New version, new requirements.

    should have foreseen the need to switch from a few hundred simple condition codes to several thousand codes

    As a side point, that one at least, is trivial.

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      New version, new requirements.

      So you're saying you would throw away the entire existing code base with all the business logic to write a new version from scratch using Waterfall? All because the data interchange format is more complex?

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        Huh?

        I think we're mixing up the tangent with the main discussion. The context is Waterfall vs Agile, specifically, quick releases. It was objected that requirements can and do change in unforeseeable ways and an example was proffered. I challenged the relevance of the example as the significant change happened long after the original design, to the point where it was not relevant to the method used for the original design process.

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