Lan Barnes wrote:
We has a group of developers at our work who went with XP with their
management blessing. As best I could tell, it was a recycling of the old
RAD concepts with all the same abuses. I also thought is was an attempt to
recreate those halcyon days as undergrads when programming assignments
were _fun_!
Some of the concepts like write the test first, small teams, and constant
over-the-shoulder peer review are probably helpful in reducing errors.
All of XP's practices stem from "established best practices", so they
are entirely recycled by nature, and that's not a bad thing. What XP
does is a) advocate taking these established best practices "to the
extreme" (i.e. past the point where you are starting to wonder if it is
a net gain) and b) integrates these practices in to a system where each
practice reinforces the other.
So, on one hand it is a fad, but on the other it's just hanging a label
on what people were already doing and being successful with. Since XP's
introduction, it's become less fashionable, largely due to the fact that
it doesn't scale to large teams (something proponents readily
acknowledge). Instead we have "Agile" development practices which is a
broader umbrella that includes XP as well as other methodologies that
share a lot of similarities with XP, but with various tinkerings to make
it work for large scale development. I've actually been trained in one
such methodology ("Scrum"), and I have to say most of it struck me as
"things we definitely should be doing".
In general, "Agile" methods have been around and popular long enough now
that I think the "fad" label no longer applies. Probably better to call
it a "trend". "XP" might be called a fad, although it still seems to be
pretty popular for small teams.
--Chris
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