Thoughtful Reactions Oral Communications

from ThoughtfulReactionsToXp

• Oral Communications
  • Does not scale well (either increased number of people or distributed offices).

  • There is much imprecision in pure verbal communication - misunderstandings occur regularly. Imagine relying only on oral communications for architecting bridges, buildings, or airplanes!

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Oral Communication doesn't scale well. If you aren't in the same or adjacent rooms, or at least the same floor ... you probably need a heavier weight form of comunication. One should also consider if any form of rapid development is well suited large numbers of people and/or distributed offices.

As for imprecision: Keep in mind the refference documents: [1] the source code. [2] the test cases.

Bridge building is very different from software development, but I'll try to work with the analogy. Before making changes to a bridge, you'd talk it over with the other engineers, draw it on paper and then run it past the engineers again. This is much like doing some CRC to discuss the change then writing and running the tests.

--EricHerman

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I just looked at AlmostExtremeProgramming agian and noticed that the first two problems listed were distributed developers and long release cycles. Not only would that make it something other than XP, but it couldn't be rapid development of any kind.