Tuesday, October 25, 2005

PhD :: XP programming

Extreme prorgamming (XP) is a agile software development method, which I came across in the undergraduate Software engineering course that I took at Toronto. It didn't make much sense to me, and usually it doesnt make much sense to people who haven't programmer in the real-world for the real-world. All I remember of XP was that it required programmers to program in pairs. But that is probably a lesser important characterisitic of the agile method. Just the fact that two programmers had to sit together and program in XP, probably amused everyone.

XP is a rapid application development methodology, whereby less time is spent on design. This immiediately requires a lot of refactoring (cleaning up) code, which is another important characteristic of XP. So when do we pick XP over other methods? XP is best used for developing systems which require relatively a lesser amount of design time. So for e.g. e-commerce systems built using the Java framework, would require a far less time spent on design, due to the availability of already-built frameworks (such as JavaBeans, etc.). The developers build on top of the framework, which in a way dictates the programmers to follow a certain design. I say this from my experience at BEA, where portals developed using BEA's Weblogic Workshop, followed a more-or-less standard design rules set by BEA. These rules were obviously well established, and have known to work. The rules could also, ofcourse be changed, by re-configuring a few XML files.

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