Criticism
Extreme programming's initial buzz and controversial tenets, such as pair programming and continuous design, have attracted particular criticisms, such as the ones coming from McBreen and Boehm and Turner. Many of the criticisms, however, are believed by Agile practitioners to be misunderstandings of agile development.
In particular, extreme programming is reviewed and critiqued by Matt Stephens's and Doug Rosenberg's Extreme Programming Refactored.
Criticisms include:
- A method is only as effective as the people involved, Agile does not solve this
- Often used as a means to bleed money from customers through lack of defining a deliverable
- Lack of structure and necessary documentation
- Only works with senior-level developers
- Incorporates insufficient software design
- Requires meetings at frequent intervals at enormous expense to customers
- Requires too much cultural change to adopt
- Can lead to more difficult contractual negotiations
- Can be very inefficient—if the requirements for one area of code change through various iterations, the same programming may need to be done several times over. Whereas if a plan were there to be followed, a single area of code is expected to be written once.
- Impossible to develop realistic estimates of work effort needed to provide a quote, because at the beginning of the project no one knows the entire scope/requirements
- Can increase the risk of scope creep due to the lack of detailed requirements documentation
- Agile is feature driven; non-functional quality attributes are hard to be placed as user stories
Read more about this topic: Extreme Programming
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)
“Nothing would improve newspaper criticism so much as the knowledge that it was to be read by men too hardy to acquiesce in the authoritative statement of the reviewer.”
—Richard Holt Hutton (1826–1897)
“I, with other Americans, have perhaps unduly resented the stream of criticism of American life ... more particularly have I resented the sneers at Main Street. For I have known that in the cottages that lay behind the street rested the strength of our national character.”
—Herbert Hoover (1874–1964)