Extreme Programming-Coding At The Speed Of Thought

 


Ten years ago, when I was an R&D Team Leader with VISA, we had a very structured software development process!

Everytime a new module or feature had to be developed, we would go through this same process -

Marketing would create an MRD (Marketing Requirements Document). Typically a 10-20 pages document, outlining what marketing wants to see, with a few sketches of how they would like the feature to work.

My job as the R&D Team Leader was to review the document with the marketing department's product manager and in turn create a new document titled FRS (Functional Requirement Specification). The FRS described the technical details and implementation to deliver the desired functionality.

I would meet with every single engineer, review the FRS and help them write yet another document that describes the unit requirement spec and unit testing. While development was in progress, our in-house QA (Quality Assurance) department would prepare two sets of documents for whitebox and blackbox testing.

We would release a new build every 3 months and the release process involved several other documents and steps, all carefully designed to minimize mistakes.

Everybody (aside of the QA people) hated this system. For some coding homework help reason QA loved it. Said it makes their job easier. But because it took so long to get a new feature fully developed, tested and deployed, often we would find ourselves deploying a feature/functionality that is no longer required. We missed the window of opportunity, the client went away or Marketing changed their mind.

This was all back in 1997.

Today everything has changed. Time to market. Time to money. Increasing speed of change in the online world all gave birth to Web 2.0. Ajax. And a new software development methodology code named Extreme Programming.



Comments