Recovery, Redemption, and Extreme Programming

requirements—gathered by the previous con-sultancy—that had outlived their build-by date. On the other side (the hard place), was a client that, acknowledging that it had switched horses midstream, was willing to scale back on functionality but refused to budge on delivery date. In short, Thought-Works found itself with a mere two months to both turn the project around and deliver a business-ready application. For the purposes of this article, we'll say that the delivery date was February 2nd, Groundhog Day. The application under construction was Web-enabled and powered by Enterprise Java Beans. Although the system had a smart n-tier architecture, its innards were seriously ill. The business objects served as little more than mappers to the database. The session bean methods—the application's brain trust—were superlong tendrils of procedural code. The written code—its style, semantics, and legibility—varied wildly depending on the area of the application one happened to be nosing about in. Tests, where they existed, were expected to fail. Building and deployment were a near mystery to more than half the development staff. Possibly because of the problem's sheer size and pervasiveness, ThoughtWorks was slow to realize how fundamentally bad things were. Even when the danger became apparent to the consultants on site, the team lead and project manager had to compete with several other projects for overstretched resources. However, once the situation was clearly stated and understood, Thought-Works responded with a swift and sustained effort. The problem areas in the application were identified, and developers with relevant expertise were brought in. After two long months, the project delivered on time. But we didn't stop there. The author recounts the tale of a development project's rejuvenation through XP: the successes, the shortcomings, and, ultimately, the lessons learned. I n the autumn of the New Economy, my employer, ThoughtWorks, recognized that one of its projects had maneuvered itself into a bit of a jam. In the software development industry it is well understood— and occasionally admitted—that such situations occur. What is less well-known, however, is how to address them. For this particular project, the prospects were not good. On one side (the rock), was a development team both behind schedule and coding to more than a year's worth of reports from the field