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Extreme Programming vs. Interactive Design

Posted by timothy on from the ways-of-thinking dept.

Hoff writes: "Here is an interesting interview with Beck and Cooper pitting extreme programming vs. interactive design. Personally, I'm all about extreme programming. It's a novel approach to help get the management work with, and for, the software engineers."

1 of 37 comments (clear)

  1. Beck 1, Cooper 0 by sohp · · Score: 4, Informative
    Kent Beck effectively skewers Cooper in the interview. While Cooper talks in the abstract about business process, requirements elicitation and better design techniques, Beck hits on the realities of everyday software development.

    Beck: From the customer's perspective, no. I've had teams be called "whiners" because after 25 percent of the budget is spent, they're saying, "We have 10 features to add and we're going at half the speed that we expected. Which five would you like us to work on first?" And the customer says, "Oh, you whiners. Work some overtime or just get back to work or quit complaining." What do you say in a situation like that? You say, "I quit." Life's too short to work on doomed projects you already know are doomed after 25 percent of the budget is spent.

    Contrast Cooper:

    I believe that defining the behavior of software-based products and services is incredibly difficult. It has to be done from the point of view of understanding and visualizing the behavior of complex systems, not the construction of complex systems.

    How many complex systems has Cooper constructed?

    But here's the exchange that really drives it home:

    Cooper: Building software isn't like slapping a shack together; it's more like building a 50-story office building or a giant dam.

    Beck: I think it's nothing like those. If you build a skyscraper 50 stories high, you can't decide at that point, oh, we need another 50 stories and go jack it all up and put in a bigger foundation.

    Cooper: That's precisely my point.

    Beck: But in the software world, that's daily business.

    Cooper: That's pissing money away and leaving scar tissue.

    Zing! Cooper might be right about pissing money, but it's what happens all the time, and Beck and XP have given us tools to deal with it.