Extreme Programming
I have studied analysis and design techniques, on and off, since I was in graduate school. The concept of Extreme Programming (XP) is the most radical, and delightful, that I’ve seen. You can find it chronicled in Extreme Programming Explained by Kent Beck (Addison-Wesley, 2000) and on the Web at www.xprogramming.com. Addison-Wesley also seems to come out with a new book in the XP series every month or two; the goal seems to be to convince everyone to convert using sheer weight of books (generally, however, these books are small and pleasant to read).
XP is both a philosophy about programming work and a set of guidelines to do it. Some of these guidelines are reflected in other recent methodologies, but the two most important and distinct contributions, in my opinion, are “write tests first” and “pair programming.” Although he argues strongly for the whole process, Beck points out that if you adopt only these two practices you’ll greatly improve your productivity and reliability.
