XP is Classic Rock

A while back I had a little fun comparing Agile to Rock’n’Roll. It’s still one of my favourite posts, and after my recent talk on the benefits of TDD, I got the idea that the best follow-up on that is something about the XP practices.

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Test Driven Development with Bonnie Riatt

The first artist that came up was Bonnie Riatt. This is mostly because Ron Jeffries has mentioned her a few times on the Scrum Development mailing list, and since that picture above is from his site, I figure I owe it to him. Oh, and it’s pretty good music!

She sings ‘I Will Not Be Broken’, which is as good a summary of Test First development as one could wish for. And if you take into account lines such as ‘But I know where I’m not going’, and ‘Pull me round; Push me to the limit’, then it’s perfectly clear we’re going through that TDD process cycle of Red, Green, Refactor in as small a steps as possible. Isn’t it?

Pair Programming with Aerosmith / The Beatles

I already mentioned ‘Come Together’ in the last post, and to be honest, I can’t think of a better Pair Programming song. It does bring with it some of the oft heard objections to pairing, with ‘Hold you in his arms till you can feel his disease’ being a succinct summary. These things have to be overcome, but you’ll end up with a classic that is covered by practically everyone. I’m going for the Aerosmith version, as their guitar work shows the advantages of having two great practitioners working together…

A great runner up was ‘Let Me Share The Ride’, by The Black Crowes. All about how sharing the ride can be done with someone who isn’t a burden…

Refactoring with Eric Clapton

So how about Refactoring? Well, refactoring is all about removing duplication. There are many songs about duplicitive women and men, talking about how they’ve been done wrong, but apart from having a completely different meaning, I’d also have to save those for a special post about management practices. A much more suitable song is the classic ‘Double Trouble’ blues song, which you can see below in a marvellous version by Eric Clapton together with Steve Winwood. This song fits so well because it reminds the young programmer of the dangers that duplication in code brings. ‘I have no job, laid of and I’m having Double Trouble

Simple Design with The Ramones / The Doors

Simple Design is not simple to do. We all have a strong tendency to try to take into account all kind of possible future scenarios when writing code. So the advice that comes out of the The Doors song ‘Take it as it comes’ is very apt. I’ve selected a cover version by The Ramones here, but the central message is the same: “Take it easy baby, take it as it comes. Don’t move too fast if you want your love to last”;. Of course, read ‘code’ for ’love’  there, but that should be automatic for any kind of real Craftsman…

Collective Code Ownership with The Red Hot Chili Peppers

Moving on from there we go on to the circle that deals with wider team alignment. It would be easy to slip in the ‘Internationale’ here, but that really doesn’t do this practice justice. Another thought was ‘You Don’t Own Me’ by Dusty Springfield, but it really didn’t fit into the classic rock theme, and is much more about not being allowed to access the… object under discussion.

The answer was, of course, found with the Red Hot Chili Peppers song ‘Give It Away’! Not only do they  know that sharing the code makes everyone wiser: “Realize I don’t want to be a miser; Confide with sly you’ll be the wiser”; but they know that this practice is crucial to working Agile:


Lucky me swimmin' in my ability
Dancin' down on life with agility

Continuous Integration with Bruce Springsteen

Of course, you can’t have collective ownership without a good Continuous Integration system. This one is easy, ‘cause that code is ‘Born to Run’!

Customer Tests with Led Zeppelin

Working closely with your customer is the best way to ensure that you’re building the right thing. And having the customer closely involved with defining the acceptance test is the answer to avoiding the dreaded ‘Communication Breakdown’ that has left so many project is shambles:


Communication breakdown, it's always the same
Havin' a nervous breakdown, a-drive me insane

Sustainable Pace with Queen

People who know me know I can’t resist a good Queen song. This one emphasises precisely the opposite of what we want, but a negative test case can be very effective at communicating the desired functionality, can’t it? With ‘The Show Must Go On’, we are confronted with all the dysfuction we find when teams push too hard to deliver impossible projects. Working in empty offices after everyone else has gone home, trying to find that last bug before it’s ready for production:


Empty spaces - what are we living for
Abandoned places - I guess we know the score
On and on, does anybody know what we are looking for...

The classical heroic programmer, working as an unsung (until now!) hero:
Another hero, another mindless crime
Behind the curtain, in the pantomime
Hold the line, does anybody want to take it anymore

And that’s it, for this post. I really wanted to get into the XP Metaphor_ practice as well, but it ended up with me getting headaches trying to understand the hidden meanings of songs like Stairway to Heaven, and Hotel California. Better not go there…