The Real World (Score 1)

In relation to the current state of the industry, your turn around is great. In my opinion, the industry stinks. The truth is that you can never be quick enough; the customer will always expect things sooner and sooner. I have worked in every type of shop there is from extremely "agile", since everyone has to put a term on something, to extremely structured. My best experiences were in an agile shop. The downside with this structure is that every developer needs to know everything that is going on. In my opinion, that should be a requirement anyway, but not everyone sees it this way. In the agile shop we could turn around fixes within hours or days. Because everyone felt a sense of ownership, people were less lazy about their work. If we were putting out fixes in hours, the expectation still grew -- they wanted it in under an hour. In the structured environment, all the developers felt stifled and disconnected from the application, without a sense of ownership; their input was less important. The work wasn't as strong and people rarely did anything extra. Business analysts who were not technical at all decided how the application should work, which was usually wrong. The development cycle was ridiculous. Something I could have completed in a week in my old environment took 6 months to a year. It was culture shock to the say the least. Some people think an agile environment is sloppy where the programmer should not be trusted. I say that if you can't trust your programmers, you need to hire new ones or a better lead. What is worse is documentation. In structured environments, documentation is treated as if it is the final product, rather than a means to the final product -- pampered and petted with political combing and pseudo-code. But if the industry wasn't this bad, Dilbert wouldn't be as funny as it is.