Re: Extreme Programming (was: Re: Consultancy company)
David Cantrell [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: On Sat, Jan 20, 2001 at 12:24:24AM +, Piers Cawley wrote: Now, I freely admit that I have partaken of the Extreme Programming Kool-Aid, and dammit I want to do it. I want to try it too. I'm not convinced by all of it - pair programming for example - but so much of the other stuff seems damned sensible that I want to give it a go. Including pair programming. I'm trying to keep an open mind on that fucking stupid idea. When they got the permie in who's taking over the project I'd been working on, we spent a fair amount of time doing the PP thing. And it was great. A *fantastic* way of getting information shared and passed on for what was basically a decently engineered but atrociously documented project. By the time I left, James knew his way around the system and was confident he could extend it as required. And I was confident he was right about that. (Did my ego good to know I'd written something without sanity checking that was relatively easy for someone to pick up quickly too...) -- Piers
Re: Extreme Programming (was: Re: Consultancy company)
"Dean S Wilson" [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: -Original Message- From: Aaron Trevena [EMAIL PROTECTED] I did a little pair programming at emap - I probably wasn't doing it right tho'. even so we did get thru the hard bits quicker and could split up to do the easy stuff. I think it made a difference but then I was mostly being a backseat coder so either we did okay or stuart was very tolerant indeed. How did you establish who would make good pairings? Was it done by trying to place two equals or was it done more on a mentoring level of a very experienced coder and a less experienced one? (I've not read that much on XP) The Dictum in the XP literature appears to be 'nobody is allowed to say "No"', pairs form and re form on task by task basis. 'Regular' pairs are to be discouraged. XP Installed has a bunch of stuff on this. Has anyone who's used XP had a client that was willing to make an employee available pretty much full time or was it more they come in for a chunk of the afternoon three times a week? I have an issue with the fact that clients will be willing to pay a member of staff to spend all day in the consultants office in case they need to be asked questions. The XP argument goes something like: This team costs you X000/day. Your liason costs you X00/day. We believe that having someone available to us, on site, full time (but able to do however much of their work that can be done remotely), will dramatically reduce the amount of our time it takes to deliver a product, and will also increase the final value of that product. Do the maths. (Well, maybe not quite so bluntly, but you take my point) I'm not saying its a bad thing to have someone on hand, I can see its uses but from the clients point of view why not just have contact by phone/email. That was the liaison has access to everyone in his base office so he can resolve issues faster with more authority than if he were in your offices. Also you have a paper trail of requests, questions and responses. There's a whole chapter on this in XP Installed. Paraphrasing, "Customer onsite == answer in 30 seconds. Customer offsite == answer today." They also point out that you can make either version work, but the onsite customer option works best. -- Piers
Re: Extreme Programming (was: Re: Consultancy company)
-Original Message- From: Aaron Trevena [EMAIL PROTECTED] I did a little pair programming at emap - I probably wasn't doing it right tho'. even so we did get thru the hard bits quicker and could split up to do the easy stuff. I think it made a difference but then I was mostly being a backseat coder so either we did okay or stuart was very tolerant indeed. How did you establish who would make good pairings? Was it done by trying to place two equals or was it done more on a mentoring level of a very experienced coder and a less experienced one? (I've not read that much on XP) Has anyone who's used XP had a client that was willing to make an employee available pretty much full time or was it more they come in for a chunk of the afternoon three times a week? I have an issue with the fact that clients will be willing to pay a member of staff to spend all day in the consultants office in case they need to be asked questions. I'm not saying its a bad thing to have someone on hand, I can see its uses but from the clients point of view why not just have contact by phone/email. That was the liaison has access to everyone in his base office so he can resolve issues faster with more authority than if he were in your offices. Also you have a paper trail of requests, questions and responses. Is the Monday night meeting still on for those of us who can't make the lunch time one? Dean -- Profanity is the one language all programmers understand. --- Anon
Re: Extreme Programming (was: Re: Consultancy company)
"Dean S Wilson" [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: -Original Message- From: Aaron Trevena [EMAIL PROTECTED] I did a little pair programming at emap - I probably wasn't doing it right tho'. even so we did get thru the hard bits quicker and could split up to do the easy stuff. I think it made a difference but then I was mostly being a backseat coder so either we did okay or stuart was very tolerant indeed. How did you establish who would make good pairings? Was it done by trying to place two equals or was it done more on a mentoring level of a very experienced coder and a less experienced one? (I've not read that much on XP) The latter. You mix skills. And the second isn't idle. He's coding up the test cases. Is the Monday night meeting still on for those of us who can't make the lunch time one? Oh, yes. Leon, are you acting as scribe? -- Dave Hodgkinson, http://www.hodgkinson.org Editor-in-chief, The Highway Star http://www.deep-purple.com Apache, mod_perl, MySQL, Sybase hired gun for, well, hire -
Re: Extreme Programming (was: Re: Consultancy company)
Dave Hodgkinson sent the following bits through the ether: Leon, are you acting as scribe? Yes. Don't expect a masterpiece though. Leon -- Leon Brocard.http://www.astray.com/ yapc::Europehttp://yapc.org/Europe/ ... All new improved Brocard, now with Template Toolkit!
