Refactor Our Writings

The standard "Call for Papers" that gets announced before each of the XP/Agile conferences is good. It gets folks writing papers about useful information - techniques that have worked well, experience using a process, etc. It is nice to see people from around the world contributing such papers to the various XP/Agile conferences.

However, I am now seeing what I saw in the patterns movement: a continuous stream of papers, with no refactoring of the literature. This is bad. It leads to a forest of ideas, with no organization and little practical value to a broad community that has not yet joined the XP/Agile community.

I would like to see authors and groups of authors come together to refactor older, related papers into new, consolidated pieces of literature that communicate comprehensive ideas on an important subject.

An example: At XP 2001, I submitted a paper to the conference called Continuous Learning. At the conference, I discovered that TimMacinnon? (sp?) had submitted a related paper. I also met Francesco Crillo (of XpLabs) who had lots of great ideas (and more important, practical experience) on the subject of Continuous Learning. I remarked at the time that the three of us needed to consolidate our ideas to produce a more comprehensive piece of literature about Continuous Learning. That hasn't happened yet, though I am committed to making it happen.

I'd like this idea of refactoring our literature to spread to other authors. I don't want the conferences to limit the size of our consolidated papers. We need to encourage ourselves to refactor what we've written in order to produce excellent new pieces of literature.

The first step is to educate conference organizers about the need to refactor our literature, so that such an effort can be included as part of any "Call for Papers." Next, let's encourage this effort by suggesting some areas that we feel need to be refactored and consolidated. For example, I've read numerous papers on Teaching XP, Distributed XP, XP Testing.

Comments, Questions, Concerns? -- JoshuaKerievsky

CategoryRefactoring