Programming Building Designing Testing Delivering Versioning Changing Automating Many folks focus only on the first two, usually because their working envionment dictates it. The third, designing, is often outsourced to a specialist role (the architect). XP, TDD and other agile appoaches have helped us remember the value of 4, testing. Delivery, versioning and change - not everyone will think these are core practices - often they seem "happen" to us as a result of working on a project over a long enough time. Automation encompasses the special definition of "laziness" programmers develop. Many programmers pride themselves on their laziness which may sound odd if you're not from a programming background; they're talking about cultivating an efficient and effective mindset to problem solving. Here's the point. The processes are not something that should be serialized in time order. They should as much as possible be done continuously. If you're used to RUP you should agree with this in principle, with the caveat that at certain times we're emphasizing a particular process more than others. Exclusive focus however and we're back to the descredited waterfall model of development where processes are entirely serial ("let's stop for a week to clean the code up", "let's not write any code until we design the architecture", "let's not do any testing until we deliver the code"). Don't go there. The RUP encourages us to iterate the processes, agile methods want to speed this up to the point where the interleaving is effectively morphed into parallel processing. Any approach that tries to parallelize the processes can be called "concerted". Anybody who is effective in their process can be deemed "excellent". By the way there's no point just talking about processes - these are things that you do. You might start out being weak at them, but that's not a reason not to start. You get good at a process by practice, not by analysis - analysis is for deciding what the processes are. The purpose of constant practice is to push the processes out of your consciousness and into your second nature. So you're freed up to act on the problem at hand in the most effective way. [tom petty: freefallin']...
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