Beck and Andres on Extreme Programming

narramissic writes "In recent years, Extreme Programming (XP) has come of age. Its principles of transparency, trust and accountability represent a change of context that is good not only for software development but for everyone involved in the process. In this interview, Kent Beck and Cynthia Andres, co-authors of 'Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change,' discuss how XP makes improvement possible."

Comments

Re:Overrated

[hclyff]

Others, such as pair programming just do not work in my opinion. Programmersare solo beasts - putting two of these dragons behind one keyboard is asking for trouble.

Pair programming can be seen as a kind of code review, but with the reviewer in equal position with the programmer. Traditional code reviews tend to be frustrating for the programmers, because the reviewers are in position of authority.

But when you put two programmers with equal authority, you have one thinking about the bigger picture and the other reviewing his mind flow. At the same time the later is writing down the ideas in code, with the first one reviewing his code as he types.

Programmersare solo beasts

Where have you been the last 20 years? The stereotypical programmer, hacking his piece of kernel over night is very endangered species, and rightly so. Like any kind of engineering, software engineering needs as much face to face collaboration as possible.

Re:Overrated

[Peter La Casse]

You really think XP is Engineering?

It's an attempt to achieve a greater level of quality through process/practices, which is as close as "software engineering" has gotten to real engineering so far. Arguably, though, "software engineering" isn't real engineering until you use formal methods to ensure the correctness of your design and implementation.