Tamara Cravit

E-Mail: tcravit@taylored-software.com

Web Site: http://www.taylored-software.com/

09/19/2003 - We're consulting on a large medical billing software project developed in .NET. Our client has a history of either BigDesignUpFront, NoDesignUpFront, or a combination of the two. Based on past history, we'll be evangelizing ExtremeProgramming as often as we can, and we're slowly but surely moving the client in that direction.

While the idea of doing ExtremeProgramming is a non-starter right now, we did manage to convince the client of the value of TestDrivenDevelopment and are implementing that in a way that embeds practices such as DoTheSimplestThingThatCouldPossiblyWork along the way. The target (already committed to by our client, with no PlanningGame or, as far as I can tell, any other kind of planning) for delivery of the beta is 12/05/2003. So, I'm not real optimistic, but I'm hoping that the practices we're adopting for this project will work and we can build on that to do XP for the next project.

Of course, we may well end up with the "the project failed for lack of proper practices, let's talk about what went wrong and how we can use ExtremeProgramming to avoid those traps on our next project" scenario, too. We'll see what happens. I'll keep everyone posted.