Dead Fish and the Pressure Dynamic

by Jim Highsmith

At the June Agile Development Conference in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA, Tim Lister, Cutter Business Technology Council Fellow and author of several acclaimed books, projected a picture of a dead fish onto the screen. It was obvious from the picture that the piscatorial remnants were in an advanced state of decay -- that is, very smelly. Agile methodologies, particularly XP, have used the concept of smell -- as in smelly code -- to illustrate the idea that software engineers have a "feeling" about the quality of the code. That feeling creates an impetus to analyze the code in more depth to understand where the smelly parts are and then extract them.