Extreme Programming

The ideas at the heart of Extreme Programming come from Kent Beck and his initial work in the field. Kent Beck coined the term in his book Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change [Bec00], which described the methodology he developed along with his associates Ward Cunningham and Ron Jeffries while working on the Chrysler Comprehensive Compensation System. This was a massive and very expensive project—and it was failing. In an effort to bring it back on track, Chrysler brought Kent Beck in as a consultant to take a look at where they were and where they were headed, and to suggest ways to fix what everyone there knew was broken.

After talking with the team, who all knew the project was in trouble, Kent was asked by the CIO to take over the project, but instead he stayed on as a consultant. One of the things that Kent brought to the project was a new office layout, which you can see in the following picture. Cube walls were taken away in favor of shared desks and a more communal setting, free of “private” spaces.

This “transformative moment” for that project, and for the concept of the workplace in general, actually evolved over the course of a year or so, during which the team was moved into a completely different space. The developers there went from knowing they were in trouble to working closely together to save the project. And part of how they got there was being open to the idea of putting the work ahead of the office space. It’s that openness to new ways of thinking—even if it seems, on the surface, to just be the simple act of rearranging the furniture—that cannot be trivialized or ignored.