Guillaume wrote:
John Larkin wrote:

http://www.extremeprogramming.org


It's interesting that the curent state of programming is so bad that
some people think having two people share a keyboard, and discuss
every line of code, is a viable approach to improvement.


I agree with that, more or less.
Peer reviewing of your code on a regular basis can be interesting, but
two people working on the same code all the time? Heck!
I have seen a couple ideas in extreme programming that I thought were
interesting, but the rest is, in my opinion, all hype.
TRUE STORY!

A number of years ago, I worked for a company doing toll road
electronics. One system they were working on was a vehicle
classification system. It used a number of different sensors to measure
a vehicle as it passed, at road speeds, through a toll point. It was
pure electronic, so speeds exceeding 90 mph were expected.

For this bit of software magic, they had hired an outside company as
contractors. They were in our test lab, working on the code. While
they were not working at the same keyboard, they were constantly
shouting at each other... BUILDING! I HAVE DAEMONS! and other arcane
nonsense. It was apparent they were working on the system, in real
time, and modifying it as they went along, in true hacker paradigm. It
was pretty distracting, as I was quietly building my own little system
(all hardware!) in the corner.

Finally, after about 3 months of this, they finally had code that
worked. The term spaghetti would be applicable and descriptive! My two
co-workers, who had been 'supervising' the development, went to
management and asked for two month to go back in, and from scratch,
re-write the software now that they knew an effective algorithm. Of
course, they were refused, and a few weeks later, released... 8-)

Charlie