Extreme Programming Explained

May 6, 2005 —

Bruce Taylor recently spoke with Kent Beck and Cynthia Andres, co-authors of "Extreme Programming Explained". The discussion touches on the principles behind extreme programming, how the roles of programmers and managers are changing, and XP's potential advantages for software development teams. Tom DeMarco, an author, consultant and lecturer on software engineering and management practices also joins this conversation. Following is an edited transcript of that conversation. You may also listen to the original interview here.

Hi I'm Bruce Taylor and this is Voices on ITworld. Our topic today is extreme programming (XP) and what it means as a loose subset of the agile software development in project management movement. Our special guests today are Kent Beck and Cynthia Andres, co-authors of "Extreme Programming Explained," now in its recently released 2nd edition from Addison-Wesley Professional. I'm also delighted to have joining us in this conversation Tom DeMarco. Tom is a well-known author, consultant and lecturer on software engineering and management practices. Welcome to you all and thank you for joining us.

All: Thank you.

Bruce Taylor: Kent, first to you. If you had to choose one key learning that has surprised you between the publication of the 1st edition and what you know today, what would that be?

Kent Beck: It's not all about programming. It's not all about programmers. Programmers aren't somehow special and to be protected and coddled. I used to say often that programmers were children. They liked not to be yelled at and to have more toys, and I think that was kind of my attitude for quite a while and I saw myself as one of those people. And that's not the way I view the world now. I think programmers are, or at least can be, adults and can and should, for the good of development and themselves, act that way.

Bruce: Tom DeMarco, you've read both books. What surprised you?

Tom DeMarco: I believe that the most surprising thing happened out of the context of the two books and the second book really reflects upon that. And that is that during the period 2000 to 2005, the whole notion of XP and agile approaches in general have come of age. When I first saw the submitted manuscript for XP, it was truly extreme. It was something that shook me because I looked at it and saw that it seemed to be a contribution from left field, a contribution from -- it's like the Citroen car seems to have been designed by people who had never ridden in any other car. They started everything from scratch and came up with wonderful concepts, but just not the same concepts as others. That's what XP looked like in 1999 to me when I saw the manuscript as it was submitted to Addison-Wesley. In the subsequent five years, XP has become mainstream, that while I wouldn't say that everybody does it, everybody is affected by it. Everybody's practices have changed because of the work that Kent did, and not just Kent, but other members of the XP community and other contributors to the agile movement -- Alistair Cockburn and Scrum, Jim Highsmith and so forth. So that's a big change.

Kent: Tom, I'm curious when you say mainstream, I think of I should be able to go anywhere and see people doing these things and so compilers are mainstream and Java is mainstream, but maybe that's my perspective versus yours, but it doesn't seem from that point of view that XP is at all mainstream

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