Beck and Andres on Extreme Programming

narramissic writes "In recent years, Extreme Programming (XP) has come of age. Its principles of transparency, trust and accountability represent a change of context that is good not only for software development but for everyone involved in the process. In this interview, Kent Beck and Cynthia Andres, co-authors of 'Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change,' discuss how XP makes improvement possible."

Re:Overrated == Someone answer this

[aaribaud]

As a non-layman, highly SW-based, real enough engineer (and other than that an almost normal person), I would not parallel, for instance, structural analysis in civil engineering with formal methods in SW engineering. "Formal method" is the name of a specific kind of SW analysis tool, based on mathematically proving the software, not taking stress scenarios into account (stress simulation for SW is called "testing" :) ).

Re:Overrated

[GileadGreene]

Off the top of my head:

• Structural engineering - static load analysis of simple structures, finite-element modeling of complex structures
• Digital hardware design - boolean logic, circuit simulation, more recently formal verification via model-checking and higher-order logic
• Control engineering - frequency methods for stability analysis (PID controllers), linear algebra for the derivation of optimal control laws
• Spacecraft trajectory design - pretty much all orbit analysis is mathematical in nature, and even the heavily numerical work is rooted in things like dynamical systems theory
• Communications system engineering - statistical analysis of signals and noise, coding theory to improve SNR
• Safety critical software - formal proof, model-checking

Note that most engineering doesn't rely on formal mathematics to ensure correctness - they still do testing as well - but formal mathematical work can significantly increase your confidence in correctness, and it can help to detect design errors much earlier in the design process. Some things simply can't be tested though - spacecraft trajectory design is one of those things where the math must be right, becuse you only get one shot.

Now, let's flip the question around. Can you give me an example of a field of "real engineering" that doesn't make use of some kind of mathematics to help understand and analyze proposed designs?

Re:Overrated

[e2d2]

Actually what you are saying is completely not true when it comes to XP. They clearly say in their docs that you can choose the pieces of the methodology that you feel valuable and leave out ones you don't use.

It also was extracted from a real world project methodology used by the C3 project. So in fact this methodology came from real world practices, not out of someone's ass as you imply:

http://www.xprogramming.com/Practices/xpractices.h tm [xprogramming.com]

I've been in environments where we've used XP, I've been in environments where we used CMM (level 5!), and I've been in environments were we used nothing at all. IMO, most practices of XP are solid and can be used well in the real world. For instance unit testing gained popularity via XP. That's a good thing. Continuous building, something that large projects have been using for years, is a good practice. Etc.

So why hate? It's good to be skeptical in this industry. But hear the evidence before you judge and when you do judge, justify it with evidence and reasoning. Not just notions of ulterior motives.