IT and Intra-Class Tensions  A couple days ago, my workplace
paid for me to go to a 8 hour training at a local software
consulting company. For the sake of not getting hunted down and
flogged by their PR flacks, I’ll call them InfoCommisars.  While
training that is free to the employee is nothing to sneeze at in
these economic times, and despite the risk of sounding
ungrateful, I would be remiss in my self-appointed blogging
duties if I did not give some sort of leftish analysis of my
experience there.  For those who don’t know, Agile is a cluster
of techniques for managing programmers and producing software.
The basic theory, as I understand it, is that the programmers
produce software, present it to the customer, test it with
users; then revise their code based on the results, present it
to the customer again, test it with users again; and on and on,
until they produce something that the customer is relatively
happy with. Agile proponents say this produces software both
faster and higher in quality, than us