Extreme Projects

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I feel honored to be asked by Kent Beck to add a project here. I had not heard about XP until I read 2 articles on it in CppReport. I think we practice most aspects of Extreme Programming in my department here at Orthodontic Centers of America, although we use the worst language I can imagine in which to practice it - Visual Basic. This requires a lot of programmer discipline.

Our main product is Walrus, an orthodontic practice management system which we started development in June 1997. We released the first public release, V1.3, in April 1998, rolled it out to the centers aggressively, and we will release 1.9 this week. We are on database structure V9. Each .1 version is really a major release with increasing functionality and changes to accommodate a changing business structure. The software codifies our best practices for operating orthodontic practices.

The application has been developed in VB5, and we will move it to VB6 in the next month before embarking on V2.0 which will probably be released before the fall, and we already have some of the roadmap in terms of what will be held off until V2.1 (although we haven't worried about implementation details or even feasibility, of course). We will be integrating a big third party application into ours at the source level during this time also.

I think the biggest challenge is that the field offices (which number 450) operate almost autonomously and they are not part of our corporate WAN - yet we have still managed a rollout which would be considered quite aggressive for a company which did have the luxury of a WAN.

I particularly like to refactor programs, ever since I overhauled a bad app at my first job. It brings clarity as you strip away everything but the essentials. I have always thought of myself as a deconstructionist before being a software builder.

CadeRoux mailto:cade@acm.org

Our Acxiom[1] team has been implementing ExtremeProgramming techniques for the past two and a half years. The team has built a large and complex campaign management application for our client's data warehouses. We developed the application using Forte[2], a distributed Object Oriented development tool.

We feel our team has put together a very successful process for developing software. At the start of the project, we did not use ExtremeProgramming. From the time we implemented this methodology, we have made great strides in improving the productivity and development of our team members as well as the quality of the application. I wrote an article about our team's experiences developing the application using ExtremeProgramming.

For a copy of this article, contact me at mailto:jim.hannula@acxiom.com

Jim Hannula

Jim, please tell us more about which of the XP practices you folks are doing, and which not. Thanks! Wishing you continued good results!

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