Exploration Through Example

Example-driven development, Agile testing, context-driven testing, Agile programming, Ruby, and other things of interest to Brian Marick

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Wed, 12 May 2004

Strong opinions

My beloved wife is a veterinarian. I may have been the first computer programmer she'd ever met. While we were courting, we hung out with a variety of my programmer friends. One day, we were walking along, hand in hand, and she said, "Your friends are nice, [pause] but [pause] they have really strong opinions [pause] about everything".

That was probably 15 years ago, but it still comes back to me occasionally. It came back to me once, in 1999, when a veterinarian at a party explained to me how simple the Y2K problem was. I suddenly realized that I'd never before had a veterinarian tell me - from a position of shallow knowledge - how easy my job is, but that I'd been guilty many times of assuming that I could, with only brief exposure, master and correct someone else's job.

I wonder how often agile projects fail because the programmers take over from the customers?

## Posted at 15:32 in category /misc [permalink] [top]