I’ve neither read Cooper’s books nor seen/heard him speak before today, when I found a this interview recorded at “Agile 2008″. It’s a discussion of agile programming, why it came about, and what it’s popularity says about the converging motivations of programmers and interaction designers. It’s long (~45 min), but I found it worthwhile.
I thought most of his points were generally sound, but I think his past programming experience really colors his process philosophy. As the “Father of Visual Basic” he seems really focused on applications that expose business processes to users. In academic computing we seem to be moving toward applications that allow users to build online spaces, generate and aggregate content in creative ways, and offer unique experiences for the purpose of teaching and learning. Our users’ goals are very personal… no two individuals teach the same way, and no two learn the same way. Because of this I still see a disconnect between his process recommendations and the kind of software we produce in the higher education open/community source domain.
I particularly liked this quote: “What you want to do is create your number one goal, to say ‘what do we have to do to elevate the quality, the desirability, of the end product?’ And when you worry about costs, you hurt that.”
In our case, there are usually so many different metrics of quality (user interaction, scalability & performance, ease of installation, ease of customization, enterprise integration, etc) that answering this question alone becomes a challenging exercise. Throw in cost, ROI, and time-to-delivery, and that challenge just grows.