InformationWeek

April 2, 2001

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RADICAL SIMPLICITY
Simplicity, But With Control

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Organon Teknika's experience supports Williams' studies. "We found it to be more productive. It saves us in design and code reviews," DeMichiel says. The pairs are continually evolving the design and catching defects on the fly.

However, extreme programming may complicate the way IT programmers are evaluated and compensated. XP eliminates any possibility that a programmer's individual contribution can be measured in terms of lines of code, function points, or number of class libraries. With extreme programming, there's no individual code ownership; everybody touches all the code. Anyone can change any piece of the code at any point. Design, coding, and debugging are merged in fast, small iterations. Code is continually optimized to reflect the latest changes through frequent refactoring.

"You really have to ask yourself what your goal is," says Cunningham, who says XP lets team leaders and managers know their programmers better than any metrics allow. With coaching and mentoring built into the process, managers quickly discover everyone's strengths and weaknesses.

Given the contrarian nature of XP, it's not surprising that there are few XP showcases among corporate IT. The most prominent example is the Chrysler Comprehensive Compensation (C3) system launched in May 1997. The massive payroll system was responsible for paying approximately 10,000 monthly employees. It was terribly complex, reportedly requiring seven mainframe systems to grind through rules for handling various types of employees. A team of 26 programmers working the conventional way had already failed on this project.

"When Kent Beck got involved, the project was in crisis, nearly dead," recounts Alistair Cockburn, founder of Humans And Technology Inc. in Salt Lake City. Beck, heading a team of eight, used XP techniques to deliver C3 in a year. The application comprised 2,000 classes and 30,000 methods, and the XP team continued to deliver new functionality for the application every month for two years.

Lightweight approaches such as XP are just starting to be taken seriously by corporate IT, notes Matt Light, a Gartner research director. Gartner sees extreme programming as part of an overall shift in business application development toward more flexible, less rigorous, lightweight methodologies, which Light describes as a "just enough" process.

Extreme programming's proponents insist the technique can be used for any application development project. They cite Chrysler's C3 and Cunningham's portfolio-management project as examples of large, complex, business IT systems that benefited from XP. But there are conditions that should be in place before IT managers attempt an XP effort. Foremost, "you must have a customer who can make decisions, not somebody who has to go back to a committee," McBreen says.

Naoto Ikeda Companies are starting to apply XP to client projects, mainly midsize ones that need some process measurement but would suffocate under a big methodology. ClickThings Inc., a New York software company that uses the Web to manage digital business relationships, has adopted pieces of extreme programming, including user stories, short cycles, and small teams to crank out a new release every two weeks. But it avoids paired programming. "Two developers on one workstation? We'd have a strike," says Paul Neilson, ClickThings' chief technology officer.

Between the demands it puts on customers and the way it subverts accepted practices, XP isn't for everyone. However, lightweight methodologies that help IT to quickly build highly changeable apps should be part of IT's project toolkit. Says Light: "You can love light methodologies like XP or hate them, but you need to be willing to use them where they can help."