(2003-02-14) Udell Ward Cunningham

Jon Udell has an interview (with overflow ) with Ward Cunningham. But the opportunity that Ward sees ahead transcends the XP debate. In a nutshell it is the opportunity to script the enterprise in business terms as well as in IT terms... "If the purpose is to continuously evolve programs for business, then what's suitable is to have clean object models that are easy to read."... "Business is always churning the logic (Iterative Business Model) to compete in the Free Market. That's what business does... The real challenge is to break that cycle. To get the programming fast enough so that it's not a boat anchor. I see two ways to do that. (Unit Test for maintainability, and program less - Buy Build Avoid)... There's a real tradeoff. Is this function worth writing? Extreme programmers (Extreme Programming) are good - maybe not great - but good at making that Trade-Off. They work as a team, doing small releases over and over. The business sponsors get a sense of what's possible, and what the cost is, and what the cost of change is... One reason XP gets projects done quickly is that people say, this is Good Enough... A lot of the test-first approach is about getting some knowledge into our tests, so the tests embody that knowledge, and check that the program matches what we think is going on... A good business runs on continuous reintepretation of objective reality... The business systems of the future will allow people to have competing interpretations of objective reality. They'll allow those interpretations to battle, and may the best win." Worth reading the whole thing.