XP is still widely unknown black magic

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Published Wednesday, September 17, 2003 10:20 PM by RoyOsherove
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Comments

Wednesday, September 17, 2003 10:28 PM by TrackBack

# Have you even done unit testing?

Wednesday, September 17, 2003 11:14 PM by Ray Jezek

# re: XP is still widely unknown black magic

You're view of XP has to be flexible though. For instance we could never do pairs programming because there are only 3 of us... hard to justify in that case.. but you can still follow the other principles of XP (such as work environment, interaction, and delivery schedule).
Thursday, September 18, 2003 3:53 AM by Chris Martin

# re: XP is still widely unknown black magic

The first thing to write in a method body is something to make your test FAIL! ;)
Thursday, September 18, 2003 4:58 AM by Roy Osherove

# re: XP is still widely unknown black magic

Chris - I agree. That's why ASSERTs and Exception throwers are the first thing:)

Ray: I agree. Pair programming is better suited to somewhat bigger teams. But I'm a supporter of even partial implementations, so PP would not have to be THE thing to keep, although it's a great technique for bug proofing and speed coding.
Friday, September 19, 2003 6:47 AM by Benjamin Mitchell

# re: XP is still widely unknown black magic

Roy, good to see you pushing the XP approaches in the .NET community. I'm a C# developer in London and there's a great XP community here with meetings every Tuesday in a pub (it's great to drink beer and talk code). Most of the people here are Java/Smalltalk guys. Hardly any Microsoft developers seem to be into ideas like this about how you code, rather than what you code. It's good to see you out in the blog world pushing the case.

It's good to take a critical approach to XP like you're doing (e.g. defensive programming isn't strictly an XP idea but it's still a fundamentally good thing to do). There's a new book on the 'case against XP' which I think is useful at redressing the balance between the hype of the methodology and the benefits of the specific practices. See http://benjaminm.net for more.