Reality can be a real problem sometimes. It seems like all good ideas run into it at some point.

Thanks for pointing us to another interestng article, Steve.

I think that software methodologies like the maturity model and later approaches like agile can be very valuable in certain situations. They're just not universal, though. I have a lot of friends who work for companies supplying the military. I totally understand and appreciate the maturity model when you need a product that absolutely can't fail. It requires a lot of money, but that's what you need to do to prevent your aircraft from falling from the skies. I appreciate concepts like Agile development, but as the article pointed out, they sometimes fall short.

The problem is that most companies in America start small. They just can't afford all of the expense of advanced methodologies. The owners hire their brother-in-law who just read "learn to program in 24 hours" to build their base software package and those of us who get called in later wind up cleaning up the terrible messes that the original developers create. In those cases you can get major improvements by introducing ANY level of order in the development process.