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Jason,
Personally I think that TDD
(test driven development) as one aspect of XP
is a very good thing
and have used it successfully myself. On other
aspects
of XP or Agile methodologies, I believe that the level of maturity of the
team
makes all the difference in the world. I know for a fact that
you can't take a
bunch of inexperienced programmers and have them implement a project
successfully with XP. Knowing what will work and what will require
further
attention requires experience,
there is no substitute for it and no amount of
"refactoring" is going to change
that fact. Rework in any form, regardless
of what you call it, is still
rework. An experienced team can visualize the
framework for a project and can
set about breaking it apart for incremental
development. An inexperienced
team cannot visualize the whole to begin
with and will spend a great deal
more time refactoring work that they have
already done in order to make
everything work together in the end. Of course
these are my personal thoughts
and experiences on the subject. I'm sure there
are plenty of XP zealots in this
crowd that would gladly take a flame thrower
to everything that I have just
said :-/
But with that said, is Agile
development a bad thing? Of course
not! We have
a very strong team where I am
currently at and Agile methodoligies work very
well. In the dot.com days I
worked at a startup with a mix of completely inexperienced
programmers and some very
experienced programmers. The desire to implement
XP was there, but the ability to
execute was not. We spent a great deal of time
analyzing the requirements
(which were changing constantly) and putting together
our base framework. Once we had
completed our analysis and design of the
basic framework, we were able to
split the work up in a more XP like fashion and
were able to easily accept the
changes to the requirements as the customer changed
their mind.
--Corey
______________________________________________________
William C.
Brown
Chief Architect. Spectrum Software Inc.
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Saturday, November 08, 2003 3:22
PM
Subject: eXtreme Programming
XP’ers
I am very interested to hear about
your experiences with XP. Do you follow XP to the letter of the law? What bits
did you leave out? What bits did you add? What team sizes? What kind of
projects? What was the fallout after you implemented XP? How many just
wouldn’t accept the change? Did you have any issues maintaining the XP
discipline? What was the general feeling from the team? Which aspect of XP had
the most controversy with your team?
I have been reading about aspects
of agile methodologies for a while now and am a big proponent of the
philosophy on the whole. However, I have yet to convert theory to practice. I
was lucky enough to see an XP lab this past week in operation and was mostly
taken aback by the level of energy in the lab and the camaraderie amongst the
team.
Please share your experiences –
good, bad or ugly.
Jason
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