Medieval Programming

Fabien today activated Symfony components, a sub-project of symfony which aims at delivering high quality reusable components without dependencies. This is a bit more like the Zend Framework idea, but makes standalone components, not ones with many dependencies. They also power the symfony framework.

The website is really appealing, great layout and a crisp and clear design. Congratulations Fabien, keep up the good work.

PS: I really like the cartoonic animals you have chosen. Awesome!

I just wanna make sure you check this experiment done by a company called it-agile. It is an incarnation of the famous software-construction metaphor. And it shows how refactoring could work out when building a castle.
The most interesting part is the video they created out of many snapshots after each iteration.
An iteration was 30 seconds, and people could do refactorings, or new construction or actually what they liked.
I did a few myself, as this experiment was done at the JAX conference in Mainz.
There were three releases:

1. Day: Build a castle
2. Day: The Emperor decided that castle construction was not proceeding well, so he set up a priority list for walls, entrance and balcony.
3. Day: The big changes of the 2. Day already resulted in something the royal family could live with so the third day was about brushing everything up and making it nice.

What this experiment shows clearly:

• without correction, projects tend to go into the wrong directions
• simple guidelines and refinement of them makes it much more structured
• refactorings are seldom done, but they can improve a lot

Any more lessons you can take from this?