28 December 2007

Software Engineering: Extreme Programming (Just the Quotes)

"Given the choice between an extremely skilled loner and a competent-but-social programmer, XP teams consistently choose the more social candidate. The best interviewing technique is to have the candidate work with the team for a day. Pair programming provides an excellent test of technical and social skills." (Kent Beck, "Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change", 1999)

"The XP philosophy is to start where you are now and move towards the ideal. From where you are now, could you improve a little bit?" (Kent Beck, "Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change", 1999)

"The new concept of Extreme Programming (XP) is gaining more and more acceptance, partially because it is controversial, but primarily because it is particularly well-suited to help the small software development team succeed. [...] XP is controversial, many software development sacred cows don't make the cut in XP; it forces practitioners to take a fresh look at how software is developed." (Kent Beck, "Abstract Extreme Programming Explained", 2000)

"Don't produce voluminous design documents at the beginning. Don't even produce them in the middle: produce them at the end. Extreme Programming teaches you how to keep the design flexible, for highest flexibility and fastest implementation. The design documents you produce at the beginning will go out of date very quickly (they always do, even on non-Extreme projects), and you 'Il either waste time updating the docs or let them get out of date. Either is bad." (Ron Jeffries, "Extreme Programming Installed", 2001)

"Don't try to freeze requirements before you start implementing. Requirements changes show that the customer is learning! Sure, it would be nice if they knew just what they wanted before you started building things, but the fact is that when they see what you're building, they'll learn what they meant. XP lets you use a development and planning approach that allows for change, without big up-front investment in frameworks or flexibility." (Ron Jeffries, "Extreme Programming Installed", 2001)

"Extreme Programming is a discipline of software development with values of simplicity, communication, feedback and courage. We focus on the roles of customer, manager, and programmer and accord key rights and responsibilities to those in those roles." (Ron Jeffries, "Extreme Programming Installed", 2001)

"The values of XP are simplicity, communication, feedback, and courage. [...] Use simple design and programming practices, and simple methods of planning, tracking, and reporting. Test your program and your practices, using feedback to decide how to steer the project. Working together in this way gives the team courage."  (Ron Jeffries, "Extreme Programming Installed", 2001)

"We all strive for simple and clear design, don't we? Of course we do. But in XP, we take it to extremes. At every moment in time, we want  the system to be as simple as possible. That means that we want no  additional functions that aren't used, no structures or algorithms that  are more complex than the current need would dictate." (Ron Jeffries, "Extreme Programming Installed", 2001)

"XP isn't slash and burn programming, not code and fix, not at all. Extreme Programming is about careful and continuous design, rapid  feedback from extensive testing, and the maintenance of relentlessly clear and high-quality code." (Ron Jeffries, "Extreme Programming Installed, 2001)

"Extreme Programming is the most prominent new, light-weight (or agile) methods, defined to contrast the current heavy-weight and partially overloaded object-oriented methods. It focuses on the core issues of software technology. One of its principles is not to rely on diagrams to document a system." (Bernhard Rumpe, "Executable Modeling with UML. A vision or a Nightmare", Issues & Trends of Information Technology Management in Contemporary Associations, 2002)

"Extreme Programming recognizes the importance of design decisions, but it strongly resists upfront design. Instead, it puts an admirable effort into communication and improving the project’s ability to change course rapidly. With that ability to react, developers can use the “simplest thing that could work” at any stage of a project and then continuously refactor, making many small design improvements, ultimately arriving at a design that fits the customer’s true needs." (Eric Evans, "Domain-Driven Design: Tackling complexity in the heart of software", 2003)

"In fact, XP works best for developers with a sharp design sense. The XP process assumes that you can improve a design by refactoring, and that you will do this often and rapidly. But past design choices make refactoring itself either easier or harder. The XP process attempts to increase team communication, but model and design choices clarify or confuse communication." (Eric Evans, "Domain-Driven Design: Tackling complexity in the heart of software", 2003)

"Extreme Programming is the first popular methodology to view software development as an exercise in coding rather than an exercise in management." (Ben Aveling, "XP lite considered harmful?", 2004)

"One of the central axioms of extreme programming is the disciplined use of regression testing during stepwise software development." (Thomas A Henzinger et al, "Extreme model checking", 2004)

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