Scott Berkun has an amusing post on ADD (**shole Driven Development), a parody on TDD which occurs when the technical decision-making process in an IT Shop is hijacked by an over-bearing personality who always manages to persuade people into doing things a certain way because the cost of opposing that person is simply too high.
The comment section of this blog post is definitely worth reading and coins some other noteworthy processes that are rampant in the industry, such as BTPWAL (Blame the People Worked and Left), BDD (Buzzword Driven Development), and IAAD (It’s Almost Done Development).
This post even prompted me to respond with my own new methodology:
WTDD (Wild Theory Driven Debugging) – A methodology that enables developers to quickly resolve debugging tasks by blaming erratic, intermittent software failures on external forces that are not immediate under the developer’s control (i.e. firewall, network, test domain, server issues).
This approach is extremely lightweight in that it requires no direct physical evidence such as logs, tracing output, or KB articles to support the assertion. When used in conjunction with ADD and loosely related coincidences, it has the added benefits of allowing you to sound smart while simultaneously weaseling out of any significant debugging effort.
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