
Artful Making
Is Fiscally
Responsible
As the agile software development community knows,
artful making in business can be controversial. Critics of artful
processes see them as ad hoc, undisciplined, maybe even irre-
sponsible. A dialogue recorded during a presentation by agile
advocate Kent Beck illustrates a fairly common opinion that
artful making in software development is a thinly veiled tactic
for avoiding process rigor. The questioner here is responding to
Beck’s criticism of sequential software development method-
ologies, which have a separate and well-defined “design”
phase:
Questioner: I’m worried about the fact that…you [agile
software developers] ...