--- In [EMAIL PROTECTED], "Lina" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>
> Hi all! I do have some doubts regarding to the metaphor practice and
> I'm wondering if anyone can help in clarifying this issue.
> Researches done on XP didn't cover this practice and some of them
> even omitted it. One of the characteristics of XP is that it doesn't
> allow the documentation to outside of the code but having this
> practice is somehow conflicting with this XP rule.
XP doesn't forbid extra developer documentation, but
it does strongly suggest that you make the code and
tests in combination serve as much as possible. The
code and tests are the only things that are absolutely
guaranteed to accurately reflect the current state of
the program, and they are also the only thing that you
can be sure the developers will read.
Comments, by the way, are not code, and are covered
in the "if you can get by without them, do so" rule.
> I do feel a bit
> confused especially that I'm new in XP and never used it before!!
> Would you please help?? Thanks.
The only way you can keep a large program
from degenerating into chaos is to have
a vision of what the program does and how
it works. The term "conceptual integrity"
was invented a few decades ago to describe
this.
A metaphor is one way of getting the same
vision into everyone's mind, so they're
all seeing essentially the same thing.
A metaphor should also be useful for
communicating with the users. For example,
the C3 project used an assembly line metaphor
for a payroll program. They could have used
a data flow model just as well - that's what
it was in essence, but that wouldn't have
communicated to the payroll department, while
the assembly line metaphor did.
There are other ways, but when you can find
a good metaphor it works wonderfully.
John Roth
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