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Is Extreme Programming Dying? I've been reviewing my fellow students reports on extreme programming.(I am a student myself) Some students are claiming that extreme programming lacks in empirical evidences, and is relatively new, hence lacking in empirical evidence.

XP is already 13 years old it should be considered as new, from my perspective. I guess the practices of XP has been tweaked and used in newer methodologies such as scrum.

What are your point of view on this, do you guys think XP is Dying?

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Why would it be dying? It's not a fad, it's a method for achieving results. As long as it's useful it will be used, and it is useful, so it is being used. – Jonathan Hobbs Mar 27 '12 at 4:35
As you point, XP practices are an integral ingredient to succeed with other popular methodologies such as Scrum. That doesn't mean XP is dying - it means its very much alive and kicking. – Magnus Mar 27 '12 at 7:04
Most programming methodologies have very little empirical evidence, at least that would stand up to scientific publication - and XP is no worse. – DNA Mar 27 '12 at 21:26

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2 Answers

up vote 7 down vote

Extreme programming can't die.. a superhero has probably said it better but you cant kill an idea.

XP (as all programming methodologies) is a set of guidelines, meant to be interpreted and modified for the team using it. And a lot of the suggestions of XP work very well, and some have been passed on to other "child" methodolgies like a daily scrum.

Communication, iterations, and CI are all a part of XP. It's about sprinting and refactoring through the core features, and iteratively fixing bugs, refactoring, and adding features. It's about keeping your code in a clean releasable state.

While these facets of XP are visible in other more recently trending programming methodolgies, XP can't die. And it won't. Take what you need from the approach and move on, feel free to mix and match any and all methodologies that work for your team.

Keep in mind this is like asking Is algebra dead because Calculus is much more powerful...

Good luck, and remember: getting stable elegant code is what's important. To get there, you will have to find what works for your team. Hope that helps!

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up vote 2 down vote

The proper "Extreme Programming" is a specific software development methodology, the one that originally popularized agile methods in general (see also How is Agile different from XP?).

Agile methods in general prevailed and are used in most companies. However (without exact quantification) it seems more people talk about scrum and methodologies derived from that than the original XP. Perhaps because originally XP was pushed as a set of processes that have to go together, but most companies only adopted subset of them.

So while almost everybody uses many parts of XP these days (planning in short sprints, continuous integration, test driven development to some extent), few really use all of it. E.g. I don't remember hearing anybody to say they used pair programming most of the time (many use it to sort out occasional difficult bit). So it's definitely not dying, but kind of decayed to the individual parts and not spoken of much as a whole any more.

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