Stephan Schwab

After a week of talks with high-ranking government officials and opposition leaders Prima Panama, a real estate developer, reports:

Panama Residential Developers Blog in Paradise recovered-Friday update:
It’s been less than a week since we starting receiving responses to our Internet survey and we’ve already achieved some spectacular results.  Our sources in the Assembly have informed us that legislation is being introduced to return the length of stay for the tourist visa to 90-days (without requiring an extension) and issuing a temporary extension of the 20-year tax exemption on new property until December 31st, 2007. We have assurances that it has the full support of the President along with his cabinet.

At the very least it’s interesting to see that in this small country (only 3 million citizens) it is possible to get into direct talks with the government. I can’t predict what the outcome of all this will be, but my feeling is that the government will come up with some exception for European and North-American visitors while maintaining the 30 days limit for everyone else.

Another thought crossed my mind later today after posting Agile Development ranks #18 on CNN. CNN writes:

Agile also has a reputation for enabling managers to deliver products on time and under budget

That claim is a bit dangerous in my opinion. The idea of agile is definitely not to deliver something faster nor cheaper. The idea is to develop software in a way that allows the team to better understand the problem domain, to do knowledge crunching, as Eric Evans calls it in his book about DDD. It is about better quality. It is about integrating change instead of following a construction plan.

The outcome business people should expect from agile is a better solution that is more suited for their business or gives them a competitive advantage due to the input from the developers. Developers can be quite good at finding ways to streamline an existing business, because they are logic experts and not follow the same old patterns as domain experts tend to do, because they have grown up in a specific industry.

In the end agile is not about saving money or faster delivery of results. It’s about higher quality, better solutions and early delivery of prototypes for the same amount of money.

That’s an interesting find for everything you loves agile development practices. CNN Money has ranked “agile” #18 on its “Top 50 Who Matter Now” list. That might get the agile idea on the radar of more business people. So in general it’s a good thing.

CNN Money in The 50 Who Matter Now – Agile Software Development (33) – Business 2.0:
Agile teams work very quickly — sometimes in as little as a week — to create small chunks of code. Once a component is finished, additional features are added, with the process repeating indefinitely.

Unfortunately they use “A new approach to Web-based code” as their second headline and connect “agile” to web-based services in the text. That might cause the business person reading this to believe that “agile” is something limited to everything web while in fact it’s simply a way of doing all kinds of projects and not even software alone.