XP Is Engineering (Score 1)

XP is nothing but engineering. Highly disciplined engineering, SEI CMM Level 5 Engineering. It's repeatable, it records, it measures, it optimizes, it plans software development in exquisite detail. XP is a painstaking and rigorous process that is simultaneously paper-light and stress-free. Anyone who disagrees with these statements simply doesn't understand XP. Plainly most of the correspondents here simply don't understand XP.

Beck's work fundamentally advances the state of the art in Software Engineering, and his book is at least as important as Design Patterns. Where Beck has failed is in anticipating the outrage of all you shmoes. Beck's book is obviously failing in communicating the idea that XP is *NOT* Cowboy Coding. If you think it is, get the book, read the book, understand the book. And then you'll probably want to try it. And then you'll understand, but that'll be too late to quench the flames.

Still, isn't this a risky way to evaluate the XP approach? Well, look at it this way: over half of the world's software projects fail outright. So far there are no known XP projects that have failed. None. So what have you got to lose? Besides, the whole thing is vastly more fun than you've ever had programming in teams. Quit yer yammering and give it a chance.

And if you're too cheap or lazy to buy the book, most of the material there is also out on the wiki-web. Most of the XP boffins hang out on wiki - go raise hell with them there and you'll find that all the questions here have been answered in detail.

XP is not programming without engineering. XP is engineering without therbligs.