Along with some of the fun new things I’ve been working on it regards to development and deployment, I’ve also been reading up on the agile development methods. I’m only getting started and I can already tell you – it’s not like anything you’re used to (well, unless you’ve already “gone agile”, of course).

Despite all of the hype right now around Scrum, I figured I’d get my feet wet with the agile concepts with Extreme Programming first. I’m assuming that most of the principles will be similar with varying implementations between the two. My “manual” of choice to get started with has been O’Reilly’s “The Art of Agile Programming” (James Shore, Shane Warden) and it’s been an eye opener.

See, I’ve come from a place where, I imagine, most developers out there are coming from and probably still will be in the future. You spend months gathering requirements, you estimate the times, you set the deadlines – all very structured and, depending on who you’re doing the work for, potentially wasteful. We’ve all experienced the frustration of changes to requirements set at the beginning of the project. Things tend to explode when someone changes “one small thing” and the entire development track is suddenly ripped into pieces and put at the complete mercy of what the customer wants.

In short, it sucks.

From what I’ve gathered so far, the whole concept behind agile programming is to prevent things like this. It makes it simpler to move around in the project and change things that might need changing. Work is done in sprints instead of one long development process and the client/business representative selects the things that will be headed into the next development session. Requirements are more fluid and testers don’t have to wait until everything’s done to find where things break.

I’m definitely still in the learning process, but so far, this agile process doesn’t seem half bad. I just wish it didn’t require such a large change in the processes of the surrounding company. I might be tempted to suggest it around my office…