In my college days, I played way too many card games - Hearts, Spades and Bridge. When you’re at an engineering school, you constantly encounter and incorporate new bidding gadgets in your game. Strictly speaking, I should have adopted a complete bidding system. But practically speaking, it was easier to evolve my game by slowly adopting pieces - especially when playing with a variety of partners.

And that’s how I approach Extreme Programming. Strictly speaking, I should probably adopt the whole thing. But practically speaking, it’s easier to adopt pieces as I gain understanding of each. This post marks the beginning of a series on how themes from XP fit into my life.

• Sometimes good enough really is good enough: a task is done when it satisfies its role within the whole.
• Test driven management: tests put you out of the box where you don’t belong and into the connections where you do.
• Tests are the real contract: if the interface is a contract, then it is a terribly underspecified one.