NYCPHP Meetup

[Adam Maccabee Trachtenberg]

On Wed, 21 Jul 2004, Tim Gales wrote:

> Ah yes, the old we'll refactor it later ('packed into a lib later') --
> very similar to we'll document that later.

XP is a software engineering methodology that removes dependencies in
your code and places them upon your developers.

The only reason you're allowed (required) to write the simplest code
possible is that you're required to refactor it mercilessly. Failing
to do the second invalidates the first.

Also, the only reason you can safely refactor the code is that you've
written a complete suite of unit tests. Failing to write tests causes
you to be unable to safely refactor, which leads to ugly code, etc,
etc.

As you can see, many parts of XP are tightly wound and interdependent
upon themselves. You can't remove one without placing stress on the
entire framework.

IMHO, this is the largest irony of XP.

-adam

-- 
adam at trachtenberg.com
author of o'reilly's "upgrading to php 5" and "php cookbook"
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