Episode #10 - A seasoned developer tells us about the benefits of Extreme Programming, Test Driven Development, Pair Programming, Collective Code Ownership, and more.

Vitalik

My guest today is Jeff Grigg who has over 20 years of experience of working as a developer for multinational corporations. He and I recently engaged into a short tweet exchange where he mentioned a few things that caught my attention. I figured we needed to talk it over on the podcast. In this episode we are briefly discussing Code Ownership and then moving into a very new area to me – Extreme Programming. Based on what I heard and the answers I received to my questions, it does sound like something companies should at least pay attention to and even try a test run of this methodology to see how it goes for them.

Test Driven Development and Pair Programming (where two people work at one computer thinking thru coding together) do seem to offer very straightforward benefits. I specifically liked what TDD has to offer because it does help build out that critical testing focused culture as well as testing infrastructure to make the testing process more streamlined and efficient. We all know testing is often underrated by a lot of companies so the TDD based culture and process can surely help with that.

Speaking of Pair Programming, it seems to me that this approach can be sometimes used for things like UX Design because there’s a lot more thinking in this area than the actual design work. If you put two smart UXers together on certain UX tasks, there’s a high chance that they will deliver higher quality work in a shorter period of time.

Anyway, I had a blast talking to Jeff! We would love your two cents if you have any feedback. You can find Jeff on Twitter @JeffGrigg1. All information about me is at vitalik.co.

And hey, who ever thought I'd make it to episode 10! :)

Thank you for tuning in guys!