Agile in the Extreme

What happens when you take agile techniques to the extreme? At the Agile 2008 conference, a couple of Aussies, Paul King and Craig Smith, gave a presentation titled Technical Lessons Learned Turning the Agile Dials to Eleven. You gotta love the reference to Spinal Tap!

Back in my days at BoldTech Systems (now Perficient), we did hard-core XP. I mean hard core. We all had tables on wheels, no cubicles, no walls - the whole team in a "bullpen". We strictly followed all of the XP practices, and if we didn't, the VP of Engineering who was the uber-XP-Coach, would quickly swoop in and set you back on the straight an narrow path.

Some valuable lessons we learned:

• Pair programming for 100% of production code isn't optimal. Many programming tasks are just too routine to justify it. For those, do frequent (at least daily) code reviews. Save pair programming for the tough stuff.
• 100% pair programming can be exhaustively intense. How many people in this world do you really want to sit shoulder-to-shoulder with for 8 hours a day? Or 4 different people for 2 hours per day? Most developers I know need some time to work alone to keep their sanity.
  
• Continuous integration requires an enormous amount of discipline. If you have to stop everything whenever a single test breaks, and you're writing lots of tests, you better not have very many tests fail.
• Don't forget to do design. XP doesn't emphasize design, but it doesn't preclude it, either. Do just the right amount of architechture and design - at the beginning of a release and each iteration.
• Test driven development is good. Period. Go ahead an turn the dial to 11 on this one!