Wolves in Sheep s Clothing

Wolves in Sheep's Clothing

Having touted the problems XP practices can solve, remember they work only if practiced diligently and consistently. A team that pays only lip service to XP practices is not an XP team and would have to be treated like a dysfunctional traditional development team. Not all traditional development teams are dysfunctional, of course, but those that are almost always claim to follow some methodology while violating it at every juncture. This would be the worst type of situation in which to try out the role we advocate in this book.

For instance, if a team claims to be using XP but doesn't have an onsite customer, then a massive, out-of-date requirements document will be replaced by pure ignorance, which is probably worse. Likewise, if a team doesn't use pair programming or automate unit tests, the code will be just as rife with unit- and integration-level bugs as that coming out of a traditional software development project. The "acceptance" testing will be the first time the code is ever tested. Make sure a team is really practicing XP before you attempt to apply these XP testing techniques.