Coding Agility, thoughts about Xtereme Programming

Sometimes we hear about Agile in the software industry, which might sound cool from the first glance. Agile encourages the practices that makes the process of crafting software more humanized. But, at the end of the day, the software is built around code, and code is being built by programmers. So, when you think more, what does it mean to Agilize the software building processes (i.e. writing the code base, maintaining it, testing it) you might wonder, how can people do this on a day-to-day basis? If you wondered before, let me please introduce you to Extreme Programming!

How XP differs from Scrum?

Scrum is a very popular Agile product management framework, that’s more interested in the processes around the software, how people interact and collaborate to get things done. While it’s very focused around software, it doesn’t provide a prescription of writing the code itself, which is the building blocks of the whole thing.

XP on the other hand, is a framework that’s more interested in the process of building the software and testing it. It aims to produce higher quality software by focusing on some engineering practices that help teams do so.

Does XP contradicts with Scrum?

Actually, XP is an Agile software development framework. They don’t contradict with each other! Although some teams tend to be more XP than Scrum, and vice versa, there could be a good hypered workflows combined from the 2 frameworks.

The combination of the 2 frameworks allows teams to have both process and engineering practices that they can use on a day-to-day basis to achieve their sprints goals in a dynamically changing environment. To know more about Agile and lean mentality, please refer to: What’s Agile and lean mentality? & What problems Agile actually solves?

What values should the team pay attention to when thinking of XP?

XP, like Scrum, has its own philosophy around building software, it’s focused more on humanizing the process of creating software. And it pays attention to some key points that your team should pay attention to:

Communication

If one of Agile’s goals is humanizing the process of creating software, then communication comes at the top of the pyramid. Communication is essential for human beings to share ideas and have aligned visions. XP encourages teams to communicate more often, and also encourages co-located small teams to have an essence of communication in any practice they do in their day-to-day activities.

Simplicity

Like we do MVPs in Agile, XP encourages engineers to have a solid understanding of what minimal thing that we can build in order to get some feedback out of it? It’s not interested on big before-hand A-Z architectures.

Feedback

Following on the previous value of ‘Simplicity’, the goal is to have something simple that we can get feedback out of it. Feedback is important, small feedback loops are something essential in XP.

Courage

Dare to say! Get this confidence to make the change happen. If you don’t talk, it’s not a good sign. Some examples of things you shouldn’t keep secret:

• Something you don’t understand.
• A process that you don’t feel comfortable with.
• A complex piece of code.
• Release plan that you don’t fully understand your role in.

Respect

Well, that’s obvious, you cannot communicate well with someone that you don’t respect. Respect here is also more of caring about other team members. How to make sure you team members won’t be stressed when they work with you? On both communication and technical levels.

XP is a philosophy in its core of how teams can approach and build their code, however, values don’t build code.