From Cards to Code: How ExtremeProgramming Re-Embodies Programming as aCollective Practice

  • Authors:

  • Adrian Mackenzie;Simon Monk

  • Affiliations:

  • Computing Department, Faculty of Applied Sciences, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YR, UK (Phone: +44 (1524) 594193&semi/ Fax: +44 (1524) 594273&semi/ E-mail: a.mackenzie@lancaster.ac ...;SabiliLtd, Manchester, UK

  • Venue:
  • Computer Supported Cooperative Work
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

This paper discusses Extreme Programming (XP),a relatively new and increasingly popular`user-centred' software design approach.Extreme Programming proposes that collaborativesoftware development should be centred on thepractices of programming. That proposalcontrasts strongly with more heavilyinstrumented, formalised and centrally managedsoftware engineering methodologies. The papermaps the interactions of an ExtremeProgramming team involved in building acommercial organisational knowledge managementsystem. Using ethnographic techniques, itanalyses how this particular style of softwaredevelopment developed in a given locality, andhow it uniquely hybridised documents,conversations, software tools and office layoutin that locality. It examines some of the manyartifices, devices, techniques and talk thatcome together as a complicated contemporarysoftware system is produced. It argues thatXP's emphasis on programming as the coreactivity and governing metaphor can only beunderstood in relation to competing overtlyformal software engineering approaches and theorganisational framing of software development.XP, it suggests, gains traction by re-embodyingthe habits of programming as a collectivepractice.