Analysing methodologies
15th November 2003
Joel Spolsky on analysing development methodologies:
But we don’t have the data. We don’t have any data. You can give us anecdotes left and right about how methodology X worked or didn’t work, but you can’t prove that when it worked it wasn’t just because of one really, really good programmer on the team, and you can’t prove that when it failed is wasn’t just because the company was in the process of going bankrupt and everybody was too demoralized to do anything at all, Aeron chairs notwithstanding.
More recent articles
- GPT-5.4 mini and GPT-5.4 nano, which can describe 76,000 photos for $52 - 17th March 2026
- My fireside chat about agentic engineering at the Pragmatic Summit - 14th March 2026
- Perhaps not Boring Technology after all - 9th March 2026