Sep 2007: Key Learnings – From Extreme Programming (Agile)

• From my experience, don’t follow XP (Extreme Programming) methodology for bigger ERP kind of product development; follow this for smaller teams (~20 members) and 2 to 6 months project.
• If the team is geographically dispersed, don’t even go near this methodology.
• Have real customer, no proxy customer. Lack of proper requirement engineering leaves customer feedback only choice for validating the requirement to the implementation, so customer role is key to team success.
• Don’t fake, pair programming. I observed many times one team member taking rest (or do something else) while other member coding, this defeat the purpose of getting quality output by pairing developers. Also pairing for non programming tasks (like server builds etc) not going to help, so avoid these.