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Showing posts from July, 2019

Recipe for chaos in an XP team

Our team failed! We failed in delivering value to the client, value to our users as well as we failed in showing the benefits of XP - eXtreme Programming to not only other teams but our managers as well. So here I am listing some of the factors which I think lead to the fall of the project, the practices and eventually the team itself. We were quite fine an year ago. We used to pair, practice TDD, interview users frequently and release awesome features to production almost weekly. I would not go to the extent of saying we were living in perfect times, since we faced some very common problems - Some people felt that TDD made them slow. Management kept questioning whether pair programming is really "fast enough" and not slowing us down. This gave birth to some "Duct Tape Programmers" in the team. (That's a real term! Google it.) "The Duct Tape Programmer is someone who is able to cobble together software that solves the immediate problem, but witho