Re: Managed Creativity
"once they've proven that they are capable of doing so."
we're back to what I see as the major weakness in [Fr]Agile: the junior guy gets to have his say-so in the design, presumably on an equal level to the most experienced and/or knowledgeable developers.
I have been in meetings where this happens, and seen the results of meetings I have ALSO deliberately NOT been part of a project, one that had meetings where that apparently happens, and it's frighteningly ugly - project I had working in 3-4 weeks as a demo takes OVER A YEAR, never completes, and then in conjunction with a round of layoffs, I'm brought in and tasked with, along with another senior developer, getting it finished up within a month. In other words, that entire year went by with moving targets and the manager going into a squee-fest with the junior guy over the endless possibilities, or so I've been told, and manager ends up going with a LOT of different ideas that should NEVER have been gone with.
Some people think that pitting one engineer against another for "competing ideas" is a GOOD thing. I think it's EXTREMELY BONEHEADED, and is only likely to result in rage-quits and self-stifling in "go ahead, do it YOUR way, see what happens" mode. Some 'not so competent' engineers are REALLY GOOD at sounding like they know what they're doing, only to find later on, that the thing just doesn't work, or never gets finished, doing it "that way". Yeah, OOPS.
And it seems to ME that [Fr]Agile _ENCOURAGES_ this.
meanwhile, in light of all of THAT, the saner approach of "every developer gets to have his own sandbox with a set of well-defined requirements" makes even MORE sense, now. The boss, naturally, would have to know his employees, monitor them occasionally, and make sure they're on track, to make THAT work...