>Ken,
>
>>These folks are at the very top of the heap in terms of programming experience and ability. They are so good that they can intuitively diagnose problem code very quickly. When they say that code has a "smell", they aren't really expressing an off-the-cuff subjective personal opinion. They are summarizing the fact that their years of experience and very high skill levels have allowed them to quickly and definitively analyze the code and detect patterns that pose very real problems for performance, reliability, and/or maintainability...
>
>You make it sound like the only people qualified to do eXtreme Programming are those with years of experience and very high skill levels. Are those among the qualifications for using that methodology?

Oh no. If that were true I wouldn't even be able to spell "Extreme Programming". :-)

I was trying to shed light on the reasons behind the terminology. It seems that some people's problem with XP is largely the rhetorical style with which it is described and promoted. It doesn't appear to be sufficiently "professional" or "scientific" or "realistic" or whatever. My take on it derives from the old saw, "Any technology, sufficiently advanced, is indistinguishable from magic". Some ideas are so simple yet profound that the only way to express them with precision is through poetry.

I don't think people need to have highly rarified skills and experience to understand and implement XP principles. I think it took people at that level to discover and elucidate those principles--and we are all the benefactors.

>Of course, I agree that years of experience does tend to help a person "smell" badly designed code almost at a glance. A more careful read-through of the code will almost surely raise red flags in the mind of an experienced developer when he/she sees code that fits the profile of "common rookie mistakes."

Every year of experience I gain enables me to smell my own code more quickly. I think that even developers with many years of experience, though, can get trapped in the mental struggle to solve a problem and bring increasingly heavier artillery (lines of code) to bear, when if they stepped back and remembered, "Do the simplest thing...", they'd realize they could just adjust the aim of their BB gun a bit and hit the target. I think even the XP gurus need to sit back, take a deep breath, and repeat that mantra to themselves at times.

Ken
www.stic-cil.org