The second paper of week 9’s reading is a
comparison of extreme programming with Microsoft-style Iterative Development. Similar
to the first paper about “agililty” (Kruchten
2007), the second paper tries to brings some insight of a
somewhat vague term “extreme programming”. Rather than giving a definition, (Cusumano
2007) uses another approach: To compare it with a more concrete
technique called Microsoft-style Iterative Development.
The author compares XP practices with
Microsoft-style Iterative Development in terms of:
- · What to focus: Planning Around User Stories
- · Small Releases of Functionality
- · System or Project Metaphor to help the understanding of project
- · Focus on Simple Design
- · Continuous Testing
- · Refactoring
- · Pair Programming
- · Ownership.
- · Continuous Integration
- · Minimal Overtime
- · Design (Coding) Standards
What he found is that: every XP practice
except simple design and perhaps collective code ownership has some analogues
in a Microsoft-style development process, so there is a 80% overlap, although
it is considered only in superficial level.
Consequently, the author gives some
comments such as “good programmers generally gravitate toward similar good
engineering practices that make sense for their contexts. I think Microsoft
more closely resembled XP in its earlier years”. It triggers a prediction that
Microsoft-style development is the evolved version of XP after some duration of
use.
The paper ends by giving some reasons and
situation to apply XP, as well as some critique of the method. The suggestion
that large projects should be broken into smaller one to be easier to apply XP
programming is a good suggestion.
REFERENCE
Cusumano, M. A. (2007)
'Extreme programming compared with Microsoft-style iterative development', Communications of the ACM, 50(10),
15-18.
Kruchten, P. (2007)
'Voyage in the Agile Memeplex', Queue,
5(5), 1.
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