I attended a course on Agile Architecture today and it was really disturbing and inspiring. Coplien is a cuckoo chick in the agile nest. He seriously questioned TDD as a poor design technique. The magical emergence of good design through a bottom up technique is in fact questionable. It reminds me so much of this whole "wisdom of the crowds" hysteria we experienced lately in popular science fans. TDDs slogan: "The wisdom of the code". He also dislikes the On-Site-Customer principle and prefers Use Cases - the Alistair Cockburn way - to User Stories. But he is friendly to DDD and mentioned a few ideas - even with same words ings like I did in my paper(!), like the mental model. He really wants usability as a key architecture driver, which I still have to think about. He proposes MVC-U, an MVC concept with the User in mind. By the way: shame on me, I am yet another guy misinterpreting MVC! It fits int the DDD world, in fact its the infrastructure linking the user to the model. At lunch we had a nice talk and we agreed totally upon the fact that all the important stuff where around in the early OO industry in the 90thies, but we totally went out of track in the 2000ens. We actually need up front design! We need to think about architecture, and no agile methodology can substitute honest, painful hard knowledge crunching. The problem with XP techniques is , as Copien stated, you have to pretend you are stupid! You should take the user story implementing only(!) the stuff your customer said without thinking into the future because You Ain't Gonna Need It and you don't do architecture but TDD because YAGNI. Its called Keep it Simple, Stupid! not Keep It Stupid Simple. We are well paid knowledge workers, our job is to know. By the way, to achieve simplicity is a intellectual challenging task. more later...

(need to read this: users.rcn.com)