Andrew Lentvorski wrote:
Christopher Smith wrote:
Any particular reason why you'd assume it'd be bad once you got in to
maintenance mode?
I don't think it's particular *bad*. I just don't think it's
particular *good*, either. And, using the C3 project for productivity
measures is warped because it never really moved from development to
maintenance.
XP was the first process which got *programmers* to accept the need
for testing. It deserves a huge amount of praise for that.
Speak for yourself. Unit testing was a huge part of Smalltalk
development going back at least a decade more than that, not to mention
kind of well understood by folks with experience just about everywhere.
Other than the Gospel of Testing, the rest of XP is pretty much a wash
or a minus. Nothing in XP solves or even makes easier the management
and communication issues. A bunch of feature cards does not
documentation make. An on-site rep is still subject to lack of
knowledge and politics.
Well, it does solve some management and communications problems. In
particular it reduces the "bus count" for a project, which is always
good. It also encourages more discussion between developers and
non-developers, which is also good. It's true that it doesn't address
having an unskilled on-site rep, but I have yet to see a methodology
that really addresses that (or much that a development team can do about
that which consistently produces good results).
And, while everybody harps, "Well, you're not doing XP!", I would
argue that slavish adherence merely gains the benefit of "Any process
done consistently is better than a perfect process done inconsistently
or not at all."
I would argue that any group with the discipline to do XP would get
the same benefit if it did SCRUM, AGILE, CMM, Waterfall, or any other
process consistently.
Well, the SCRUM guys claim that Beck basically stole their idea (which
he doesn't much deny either), and of course Agile is really just a
broader tent than XP, some would say the same about CMM. Waterfall I
have to take issue with though. I have seen improvements when a team
moves from waterfall to XP, SCRUM, CMM and RUP, and the discipline to do
it right came from how awful things were under waterfall. ;-)
--Chris
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