NYCPHP Meetup

[Adam Maccabee Trachtenberg]

On Wed, 21 Jul 2004, Tim Gales wrote:

> In theory I guess this could work. But it strikes me that if the
> deadline for delivering the system overtakes you, you might run
> the risk of delivering a system into production without much of a
> coherent design -- though you would have avoided an initially
> wrong design.

The whole idea of a final "deadline" is an artificial concept. In XP,
you've delivered a working (but incomplete) version much sooner than
you would under the classic waterfall model.

At that point, any future iterations are just further refinements of
the working system. These releases fix whatever deficiencies are
identified by your clients in the existing program and add whatever
the clients say are the most important features to add at the current
time.

> But it just strikes me as fraught with danger -- maybe that's why it
> is called 'Extreme'

The danger is reduced because you always have a deliverable
product. With short release cycles building on top of a working
system, you can never get too bogged down into a morass of unworkable
pieces.

This lessens risk because you don't have the potential to program for
six months and end up with a system that doesn't compile or is so
unusable that you need to throw it away and start from scratch.

-adam

-- 
adam at trachtenberg.com
author of o'reilly's "upgrading to php 5" and "php cookbook"
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