Is the most influential software development practice in the industry any good, or is it just another fad? How would you know? Is your idea of software qualit

Is the most influential software development practice in the industry any good, or is it just another fad? How would you know? Is your idea of software quality any good? How would you know? Why are you impressed with these guys? I'm not. I don't want to do what they do. I'm much more impressed with Excel than anything I've seen from methodology gurus. I can only imagine how real-world crufty that code base is, but a lot of cruft is the residue of solving real, non-trivial problems. I know for a fact Excel has had a lot of that baked in over decades. Did you ever see the blog posts where one of the original agile guys tried to write a sudoku solver with his methodology? I make the following conjecture without proof: it is demonstrable that agile methods and design patterns are better suited to counting fruit at a grocery than to solving interesting problems with computers.