Adopting Xp

Solving the worst problem the XP way

I had learned from these pages that I shouldn't be afraid of leaving the job if it didn't suit me. I decided to take the whole thing as an exercise : I would systematically discard the first thing that came to mind when confronted with a question or problem, and instead ask myself "how would XP handle this".

As it happened, a crisis was at hand. Bless (the firm's name) had been evaluating commercial ContentManagementSystems for use in a large project. This was to be a critical subsystem in our "backbone" technical platform - we couldn't afford to choose wrong. The only serious candidates on the shortlist had hefty price tags, too - if we decided to buy such a system, the very extent of the financial commitment meant we would be unable to switch to another in the short term. We couldn't afford to choose wrong.

The problem was, none of the candidates did quite what we wanted. There were serious architectural concerns with even the best of them, too, at least in my humble architect's opinion.

The question naturally came up : "Can we implement our own ?" Well, we could, of course. Nobody was stopping us. Only... The deadline for going live with the Web site that was going to be built on the CMS was less than a month hence. (We couldn't choose wrong.)

That was our worst problem. I tried to see it the XP way. "Well, what we can do is implement something. I can't give any guarantees as to how much of it will be implemented in a month; I won't even hazard a guess as to how long it would take to implement as a whole. I can't draw UML diagrams for it, or write technical specs; that would take time from coding it, which we can't afford. Oh, and I have two kids - I can't do much OverTime. But I should be able to do something simple that will have very few bugs, and show a working program early and often."

I had more or less expected that would be the end of my brief but interesting career with that firm. To my pleasant surprise, the right decision was made. OK, they said, we would do it, and we would do it the XP way. Oh, and we'll release the result as OpenSource too; if we're doing something crazy, let's be crazy all the way. (How's that for OneUpManShip? ?)

And that's how I got started on my first XP project.

In the process of being chopped up into smaller pieces to flesh out AdoptingXpPatternLanguage.

CategoryExtremeProgramming, CategoryAdoptingXp