Understanding Software

Development Processes and Productivity

What's interesting is that, as far as I know, every valid development process follows this cycle as its primary guiding principle. Even large-scale processes like Agile that cover a whole team have this built into them. In fact, Agile is to some degree an attempt to have shorter Observation-Decision-Action cycles (every few weeks) for a team than previous broken models (Waterfall, aka "Big Design Up Front") which took months or years to get through a single cycle.

So, shorter cycles seem to be better than longer cycles. In fact, it's possible that most of the goal of developer productivity could be accomplished simply by shortening the ODA cycle down to the smallest reasonable time period for the developer, ...