tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12948038.post1782707993559914872..comments2023-07-29T09:15:17.416+01:00Comments on allan's blog - Agile & Digital Business: Other things about SAP (which might block Agile)allan kellyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06262139490250478379noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12948038.post-20464985427171787752009-11-01T21:36:43.033+00:002009-11-01T21:36:43.033+00:00I maintain a Windows GUI to an SAP application for...I maintain a Windows GUI to an SAP application for one of my clients. As I don't do any SAP development myself, I have a very shallow understanding, but I have some experience of how development can work in practice.<br /><br />How agile a given development team is is entirely up to them. For example, though the team I work with have a design-implement-test process as their baseline, they are very happy with iterative and incremental development in practice. We have designed several new features piecemeal over multiple releases of both the server and GUI. The original design documents are treated as a source of inspiration and direction rather than a rigid instruction set, and features are frequently cut either partially or totally as priorities change.<br /><br />I think I'm the only member of the team that uses an automated test harness and does TDD (though I can't say for sure that the SAP developers don't have automated test harnesses), but I'm not the only member that does testing --- we all test our code, both in isolation and in concert with the other developers.Anthony Williamshttp://www.justsoftwaresolutions.co.uk/blog/noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12948038.post-63004140000174166212009-10-31T17:50:29.082+00:002009-10-31T17:50:29.082+00:00Allan
I was a little surprised. To not inundate p...Allan<br /><br />I was a little surprised. To not inundate people with details I decided to just state that a lot of what was told you is somewhat of a myth (the one about configuration management is not and keeps surprising me). For example, there is automated test software besides ABAPUnit or whatever it might be called.<br /><br />Generally, what SAP people do is wholly different from what developers of the kind you meet do. It's a little like comparing apples and pears. I've seen it for a couple of years now. SAP software is highly integrated and often tailored to the needs of the company that uses it. There are clear benefits to using SAP - but standalone is not one of it's strengths, let's say. The use of skills is different and yes, the culture is different. I would posit that SAP as a technology is nothing less "agile" than Java if you consider the scale of the problem. It's even open source (to throw in yet another hip term).<br /><br />Yes, I'd readily go back to my Eclipse workbench and refactor away. But I also believe that many "agile" developers do not see the other side of the coin, and this is why SAP keeps getting bought and used, and not a truckload of agile programmers.<br /><br />Cheers,<br /><br />HansHans Wegenernoreply@blogger.com