One thing that really gets under my skin is companies (or should I say code-cowboys) that advertise on their web site that they are Agile or Extreme. These companies use these terms without even having the faintest idea of the true meaning of the terms. Many a company web site advertises “We use Agile...bla...bla, bla!” or a job ad goes “We use Extreme Programming”. Then when you start asking questions like “Which of the Agile (XP/Scrum) practices do you follow?”, you get people starting to stutter and mumble something about not having a corporate culture dictating their development process or that they don’t invest any time in documentation, because it is a waste of time.

So you wonder what are making me rant like this. Well, I have a little story.

A while ago I saw an ad on a local job search web site:

We are looking for a talented, professional and experienced .net Developer to work in a creative, dynamic and motivated extreme programming team.

Join a team of 4 other Senior Developers, a DBA, an Analyst Programmer to extend our development capability on a mixture of engaging and exciting new internal systems and external web products.

The team environment is creative, cooperative and collaborative. We tend to work more in an extreme programming methodology so flexibility, knowledge sharing and brainstorming in addition to hard out coding are essential.

Not having too many agile opportunities come around in our market, I wanted to investigate the opportunity a bit more. I thought that it looked interesting and followed up on the ad. So I was invited to meet with three representatives from the company.

The meeting started with the usual cordial explanation of my career path with some excursions into technical details on certain aspects they found interesting. But after a couple of minutes I started to get the feeling that these interviewers don’t have any knowledge or experience in Extreme Programming at all. So I became very suspect of the whole preceding.

After about half an hour, I had to ask the question “Which of the extreme programming practices do you employ?” A weird moment of silence followed and then I get the Corporate Culture story. So now I am really puzzled. I then ask about Test-Driven Development and they explain that they are also looking to employing some testers to join the team. At this point I had to bite my lip to not laugh out loud. So now I’m wondering what their definition is for Extreme Programming, because this is becoming really interesting. It turns out that for them having impossible deadlines and then working 16 to 20 hour days for two weeks straight to deliver the project is their definition of “Extreme Programming”.

Sadly to say, I was not impressed by these people.

I’ve got a few other examples as well, but for now I will stop the ranting.

powered by performancing firefox