Experience Matters
Martin Fowler has posted a small entry on his bliki entitled AnecdotalEvidence in which he makes the point that experience matters.
The following quote is what stood out to me.
Last year I was involved on the program committee for a conference and reviewed three papers, all of which followed the same basic theme. Each one discussed an idea that could be used to improve software development. The crucial flaw in each of them was that the authors had not tried their idea out - even once. That’s why I voted for rejection on all of them.
The reason that it stood out is that I have professors at school that are like this. My software engineering prof is trying to teach us XP without ever having tried it himself. I asked him at the beginning of the course what his professional experience in XP was and his reply was that he had none. He had simply read a few books and expects us to put it into practice. As such, some of what he is teaching is old and slightly out of date with the current thinking on XP. This begs the question, how can you teach something that you have never tried yourself?
