Re: Extreme programming

From: Fabio Mascarenhas (mascarenhas@acm.org)
Date: Fri Apr 27 2001 - 09:40:30 MDT


----- Original Message -----
From: "Patrick McCuller" <patrick@kia.net>

> A word of caution: extreme programming is not completely proven, and much
of
> its advice goes against 30 years of software engineering practice. That's
not
> to say it won't eventually be considered superior, only that there are
other
> methods that are known to work reasonably well now.

Well, XP is kind of like a complex system. The individual practices add up
and reinforce it other. Take the "no upfront design" rule. At first sight it
would quickly lead to programmers coding themselves into corners, but there
comes Refactoring to correct the design as it's being generated, and there
comes Unit Tests so the programmer can change the code at will and know if
it still works and what broke, and there comes Pair Programming so another
pair of eyes can spot some mistakes, and the list goes on and on.

More and more projects are trying it, so more concrete results are already
coming.

Fabio Mascarenhas
mascarenhas@acm.org



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