Re: My experiences moving a company from traditional development to XP ...

Sigh ... yahoo just can't keep a secret. Oh well. :)

> So don't say that. Say instead: "Here's how long it will take to do each of your features. We'll do them in any order you want. You want a release by August? OK, you can have any twenty."

Yes, that's the portion of scrum that I'm introducing into the mix. We have a PendingFeatures page on our wiki, which lists User Stories in priority order. Development picks them off the top and Sales and Marketing argue over the order. Once we get into the top three, we really encourage them to commit to the features importance. This is working rather well.

> Neither Scrum nor XP recommend code reviews, though some teams use them. XP does recommend working together. That's not code review, it's partnership.

Agreed. But since the developers are so loaded currently with tasks to meet the deadline (from the old days), for now, we have to do it via code reviews. And it is working rather well. I've found that the return on investment for both approaches nearly equal. 

> Then don't refactor ugly but functional code. Write clean functional code. Do so by making sure that your code never deviates from clean by very far, and bringing it back into line immediately, not as a separate process.

That's the intention ... but some of it is just teaching old dogs new tricks. I'm using Fowlers refactoring parlance to bring the conversation level "up" in the reviews. 

> Sounds good. The code review should serve, if nothing else, to help the programmers see, hopefully in a non-threatening way, that there is improvement to be made.

> Keep us posted, please ...

Will do!

-Sandy 

 



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