Finished Two Projects

Just finished two projects of a client, let's call this client Yabe for potential legal issue.

Yabe is a big client, brought to us by friend of ThoughtWorks. They use ClearCase and Eclipse. I have to say, the set up of the ClearCase and Eclipse is very anti-agile. (I'd like to say it is the products themselves but I have met some other developers that argued that it is the setup instead of the tools themsevles). Everytime I work on this environment, time just fly by while I am staring at the screen waiting for something stupidly long to finish, and before I know it, it is already past 9pm. I cannot imagin how in-hourse developers live their lives, but I sure hope their stock options are well worth it.

(Ok. Here is a good example of how screwed up these tools, or their settings, are. I renamed a private static method that takes no argument and returns void, and it tooke Eclipse 2 minutes to come back. Auuuuuuuuugggggggggggggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhh)

Here is another testimony of ThoughtWorkers' ability. Dave and Alex (An independent consultant) pulled the subsystem and its library over to a CVS repository, and use IntelliJ to build upon it. CruiseControl is set up. Periodically we sync. up to the Yabe world using a script that Alex wrote. So with CVS and IntelliJ, we were able to happily write programs using test-driven development. Yabe has a document that supposely contains all the requirement of the new application, similar to the use case document. We divided it up into story cards, gave them numbers and came up with our estimates.

So from our team's point of view, we are doing pure XP. We pair, we track, we test, we refactor. The resulting application stays healthy wihle we continue adding more and more compilcated features (BTW, writing web application without using session tracking is not a trivial task). It is my first XP project since the one for Novell in year 2001. And it just felt like an place I belong.

One problem is that as far as the customer concerns, this is just like any other project that they have done. Throwing the document into a blackbox and hoping something good will come out of it by the time of the contract. We didn't realize that ANYTHING different from the document, we were supposed to get approval from the customer. Of course being an XP team, we simply shot an email to the client project manager, asked the question and did the change. At the end, we did more than what the document said, and yet the customer thought we were two-week behind.