Bill La Forge

And I just moved to India to start an XP development center.

We are located in Raipur. Internet access is very good here and improving monthly. By June we expect to have access as good as any city on the Indian Internet Backbone.

Our specialty here will be Java and XML. Our hope is to do product development rather than outsourcing/contracting.

I got my BS in Computer Science back in '71 at PSU, so you could say I've been programming professionally for 3 decades. My first programming language was Fortran II.

I've been following XP practices for a long time, but I was always shy about it. It is very helpful to have something to point to to explain why I work the way I do. I love XP and pair programming and all of it. I started refactoring back in 1980--which was the first time I had access to an editor. (Before that it was punched cards and then patching source files on disk.)

My big interest is in data centric programming. Which is to emphasize the compositional aspect of component-based programming and the movement of meta-data from code to XML documents.

Our latest project is JxUnit. The idea is to move test data out of the code (a la JUnit) and into ascii files (using XML), where it is easy to add new test cases.

One of my big concerns in putting together an XP development center is the time it takes to build a functioning team. Refactoring, for example is not a common skill here and takes time to learn. And from what I've read, it takes two or more years to build up to a group of 40.

I've been thinking that there may be a way to make XP more scalable and still be 100% XP. For want of a better name, I'm calling it ExtremeDevelopment.

No, we are not starting off with a team of 40 lost souls. We're up to 3 at this point. But we've got to grow fairly fast to keep ahead of the technology curve.

B-)

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