
User Stories Applied For Agile Software Development
Reviews

I recently learned a fundamental dichotomy in expressing oneself: you use either the 'esoteric' or the 'exoteric' mode. (The exoteric writer says exactly what she means, minimises ambiguity and tries to do everything with explicit reasoning, for the largest audience they can, with imagery and irony only as decoration. The esoteric writer – distinct from, but often coextensive with the woo-woo mystical metaphysics fans also called esoteric – does the converse. Most ancient writers wrote esoterically, which is one reason that undergrads and other fools, like me, think that ancient writers are vague and low on content. Up to now, I have been confusing the rhetorical stance - see Heidegger, Deleuze, Derrida, Caputo - with the magickal crap. But so much of the Analytic / Continental divide can be explained in this single distinction! [The revival of the distinction is due to that lionized demon Leo Strauss.] Maths is an interesting border case, but its clarity and attempt to destroy ambiguity make it exoteric, I think.) The exoteric intention strikes me as firstly just good manners and important for intellectual honesty (accountability, critical clarity). But one thing I dislike about studying computer science is that all the materials are utterly exoteric. I crave art and irreverence in formal contexts, and those are always at least somewhat esoteric. The ‘Agile’ software thing strikes me as good, a way of making the hag-ridden and monstrously expensive dev process work. But all the material around Agile, LEAN (and the wider business-marketing-HR-systems theory blah that represents most employed adults’ only engagement with passably academic work) is so exoteric that something in me rebels.






