Discussion Utilisateur:Didier.Besset

Un article de Agile-Swiss.

Personal XP notes

When I joined the redsafe.com project at the end of August 2000, I was given the lead of a team of 5 people, all coming fresh from a one-week Java class with the ambitious goal of delivering working code in 3 weeks. Tough assignment!

I immediately imposed XP as the way of working, but given the little Java knowledge in the group, I had to decide on the pairs (XP lets people choose their pair) making sure that people with complementary competence were working together. Later, I would pair the ones that progressed fast with the slower ones. I made sure that we were solving today’s problem (simple design) and not tomorrow’s. During pair session, I made people aware of what it means to write readable code. One day, I was rewarded when one of my team members made me rewrite my own code because it was not readable enough. Pair programming is never a one-way street, even between a junior and a senior.

At the end of the first day of work, we had a working system (continuous integration) that we kept growing gently, not forgetting to refactor as new functionalities were added.

Thanks to the use of automated testing (with JUnit), we were able to deliver our first assignment on time where the other teams could not, and ever since we have been the only team of the project to deliver code on time. We also were the only team that did not have to rewrite their code.

The other project I participated at redsafe.com was the admin console. Here, I was working with experienced Java programmers and the project was equally successful. The joke among the customer was that it was taking them longer to formulate a change request than for us to implement it. And sure enough, we something finished the implementation before the change request was validated.

But, what is for me the most rewarding aspect of XP is that several programmers who have joined other projects after the redsafe.com days and who have been forced to abandon the XP way, call me back to tell me how they regret the way they have to work now and how much they would like to be working again with XP practices.

eXtreme Programming is also a nice way to live a programmer’s life.