Middle-Way Programming
I just read Jonas’ entry commenting on an article by Tom DeMarco and Barry Boehm, which made me remember one thing I’ve been thinking about recently. Jonas writes about the “extreme approach” (of XP) versus the “balanced approach” – that is, one somewhere in the middle between XP and traditional approaches.
I think that XP actually represents “the middle way”, not the extremes. It’s definitely neither about overdoing nor “underdoing” things (such as design, documentation, testing, etc), and constantly paying attention to whether you are overdoing or underdoing. Programming on the razor’s edge!