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