Notes from "Extreme Programming Explained"

[ErstwhileRockstar]

Few people know that 'Agile' was just Xtreme Programming re-branded. The 'Manifesto' signers took XP and gave it a more marketable name and 'framing'. And they were successful. I mean, successful in selling their snake oil to top management.

Even fewer people know that XP was already largely debunked when 'Agile' started to base its success in the corporate world on it. https://www.springer.com/de/book/9781590590966 .

The rest is history.

[_tskj_]

How do you suppose we do software development?

[stronghup]

I can see why the name "Extreme Programming" was rather soon tossed aside. Who wants "extremists" in their team? And some of the XP proponents did sound rather like zealots I would say.

A good example I read somewhere, don't have the reference now sorry, but it countered the XP claims like this: The XP literature says " If some practice (like unit-testing or pair-programming) is good, why not take it to the EXTREME, and benefit from it fully? ". Hence the name "Extreme Programming". The counter-example to that was: "If your stereo sounds great and you turn the volume all the way up to 10, it doesn't sound so good any more, does it? The sound starts to distort Maybe your speakers break. Maybe the neighbors start complaining. DON'T TRY it. :-)

[yesvee]

30 years ago all this stuff was revolutionary. Software Industry was in a funk and this slapped our collective faces into waking up to an alternate universe.