< rant on > (read this and imagine me speaking 200 kph with spittle flying from my lips while coffee spills from my mug as I gesture violently.)
Serena Prototype Composer is a poster child for all things bad. I have watched one of their overview videos and it was like watching a car wreck. I have chosen my religion and it is the complete opposite of the methodology Serena seems to be promoting. It promotes waterfall development, when I am for spiral development. (
Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.) It promotes reams and reams of (virtually useless) documentation when you should
Working software over comprehensive documentation. It claims to help get the business people talking with the developers. That is a load of crap. You get business people playing with this, this, monstrosity, creating these diagrams and forms that are completely useless to the programmer who has to build them all over again in their development tools. Duh! DRY!! What's worse is these business puke's now have the attitude of "What's taking you stupid lazy programmers so long to build an application THAT WE ALREADY BUILT IN OUR (TOY) IDE!!". I am not saying the programmer's guild needs to keep our secret meetings secret so others don't find out all we do is read news feeds all day. It is the same principle that makes me prefer to mockup UIs via a tool like
Mockup Screens. (As they say on their website, "Create screens which can't be mistaken for '90% done' application".) Additionally, although it may sound good in theory, I can tell you that this will just result in even greater division between the "business people" and the developers. Instead of working together, the business people will stop communicating with the programmers because they will go off to their offices (empowered by this "prototyper") and "build it themselves". They will then throw it over the wall to the developers and their only reply to questions will be, "Didn't you look at the prototype? It's all there in the prototype. Don't bother me with these sophomoric questions, look in the requirements documents." The two groups need to work together, not separately using different, and incompatible, tools. (
Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.) Ideas should be discussed in person. (
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools. The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.). I can go on and on, but I will leave the further berating of Serena's Prototype Composer as an
exercise for you readers.
< rant off >
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Thanks for the laugh Ralf.
Don't make me start posting in white font with the text in Russian that I have ROT13ed!