More XP Stuff

Matthew R. Heusser HEUSSERM at student.gvsu.edu
Sat Apr 26 08:11:32 CDT 2003


1) Slipping in Pair Programming: 

In my experience, when there is a crisis about to brew about a certain piece of the software - that will be hard to develop, is mission critical, and is needed Real Soon Now (TM) - management is more than happy to loan out bob or joe or sally to do a few hours of pair programming, perhaps a day or two.

And it will work.  And the next time ...

2) We didn't get into Time - Quality - Features - Resources and Steering.  Here's a good article on it:

http://www.xprogramming.com/xpmag/kings_dinner.htm

3) An hour is a very short time to explain of XP without giving out a few incorrect impressions.  There is even an entire web-page about debunking XP misconceptions:

http://www.xprogramming.com/xpmag/Misconceptions.htm

Here's a big one:  What's the deal with "You Ain't Gonna Need it" (YAGNI)?

"I say "do the simplest thing that could possibly work". Kent asks "what is the simplest thing that could possible work". Do we really expect that you'll forget everything you know about parsers or EJBs or relational databases? Of course not! We do want you to think about using smaller, less-powerful and simpler tools before bringing out the big guns. Fifty web pages need some kind of organization, I know. But they probably don't require quite the same amount of structure than Amazon needs for their thousands. As technologists, most of us revel in our ability to handle complexity and love to learn the latest new thing. We need a reminder that our job is to produce simple, maintainable programs, Real Soon Now, not to build giant enterprise software to support a few web pages.

We say "YAGNI", "you aren't gonna need it", to remind ourselves not to add features to the software just because we happen to be passing through and think of it. We do that because

deciding which features we work on is a business decision, a Customer decision in XP, and we want to make sure they get to decide; 
we often guess wrong about how to do the idea we have; 
it's usually no harder to put in later, and often easier, so money spent now could be spent later with just as good an effect. 
So we say YAGNI to remind ourselves of these facts, and to bias ourselves strongly toward simplicity. We trust that we'll use all our knowledge and wisdom to apply simplicity wisely."


Matt H.(eusser)




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