Re: [extremeprogramming] What has changed for you over the past 20 years?

 George, thank you for raising the discussion to the top level.

Things that have changed for me over the past 20 years:
 1. XP as a practice has been forgotten and many parts of it have fallen out of use.
2. I find myself continuously reinstalling [XP and Agile] best practices at the jobs I'm taking on. Continuous Integration, unit testing, refactoring, iterative development...

3. Teams are practicing either 'run as fast as you can' SDLC which is essentially a no-practice, or full blown waterfall, as in 'let's-plan-a-year-out' with all consequences.

4. Raise of the 'Product Manager' job which is a strange combo of a member of sales organization and a surrogate user. Engineers no longer can talk to users.

5. Use cases is not a thing anymore. Use cases were replaced with user stories that are short blurbs leading to ambiguity in implementation and testing and last moment changes in requirements.

6. Large scale projects. SW organizations can easily be in hundreds of people that ends up in a zoo of way of doing things unless top leadership pushes a particular approach down.
7. Code reviews now must which is great.

All in all, I feel that new entrants into the software development job are not educated in the engineering part of it. As a result the SDLC is largely defined by idiosyncrasies of the engineering leaders. Or teams self-organize and end up with no-process.

Slava

    On Tuesday, December 3, 2019, 9:51:18 AM PST, George Paci <[email protected]> wrote:
 
   
(This thread was buried in another thread; I'm trying to transplant it to the top level so it gets more exposure.)
 
Things that have changed for me over the past 20 years:
 
1) Nobody says "XP" or "Extreme Programming" anymore, even when they're doing many of the practices.
 
2) Developers didn't test 20 years ago. Now unit test suites are ubiquitous, and many of them are well-maintained.
 
3) Everybody's talking about User Stories, which were weird 20 years ago. Unfortunately, the tools have taken over the meaning, and I need to chant, "The card is a token for an ongoing conversation" over and over. Sometimes it gets through.
 
4) I no longer focus on the practices when I spread them; I just start using them when I pair with someone, and they catch on (or don't).  Maybe I should have specific sessions where I focus on, say, refactoring, or TDD.
 
There's probably more I've forgotten. 1999 was a long time ago.
 
--George
 
A lot of people mistake a short memory for a clear conscience.
     - Doug Larson
 

| Subject:  | Re: [extremeprogramming] What has changed for you over the past 20 years? |
| Date:  | Tue, 29 Oct 2019 08:39:12 -0700 |
| From:  | Jay Bazuzi <[email protected]> |
| Reply-To:  | [email protected] |
| To:  | [email protected] |

 
 
 From Arlo I heard a story that Corey Haines would experiment with doing a project without one of the practices that he normally relied on for success. He found that his defect rate was steadily decreasing over time, project to project, but when he skipped TDD his defect remained the same (he wasn't learning) and when he skipped Refactoring his defect rate went up (quality depends on design more than on tests). 
  That seems to match your experience, JB. 
  -J
  On Tue, Oct 29, 2019 at 7:38 AM J. B. Rainsberger <[email protected]> wrote:

   On Tue, Oct 29, 2019 at 3:16 PM Ken Auer <[email protected]> wrote:

 Thanks, JB, 
  I was surprised.  Let's see what happens.  The timing is interesting as I was just recently prompted to dig out some old articles/papers I've written and have some reflective time to publish updates... what is timeless since the early 2000s and what has evolved (at least for me).
 
  This leads to a wider discussion regarding what has changed for you as an XP enthusiast and practitioner over the years. I'd like to keep the question wide open, so don't hold back. 
  I recently experimented with evolutionary design without tests and I found it enjoyable and illuminating. 
  I worked with a group of 3 people. They wanted to practise microsteps and to see a design evolve. For 3 hours, I drove while they typed. They practised the microsteps inside their IDE (elementary refactorings, keystrokes) and we went through 2 features of one of my teaching examples, "test"-driven (meaning that we wrote and ran the tests in our heads). It worked surprisingly well! They got to see some simple design evolve (albeit with no pressure from tests) and that made them happy. They could more clearly _see_ the power of evolutionary design, related to being able to defer commitment and change directions as needs change. We also just went more quickly than we would have had we written the  tests. 
  Of course, I told them that if we got into trouble, then we'd start writing tests. Fortunately, we didn't get into trouble in just 3 hours. :) 
  So it turns out that after a decade or two of practise, one can live without the tests a surprising amount---at least in some contexts. -- 
    J. B. (Joe) Rainsberger :: https://tdd.training :: http://www.jbrains.ca :: http://www.thecodewhisperer.com 
     


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