Extreme Programming - Criticism

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