Taking Programming to the Extreme

By Erik Sherman July 19, 2002

"The quest for quality software may require programmers to lose the cowboy attitude and learn to cooperate.

"Mansour Raad had a big problem. His start-up firm, DiscoverCast, was developing collision-detection software for the airline industry—mistakes in the code could cost lives. But money dried up after a first round of funding, and hiring additional programmers to finish a bug-proof version was out of the question... So Raad instigated a relatively new coding discipline called extreme programming."

Agile programming has been a hot topic in every major publication from the Economist to the MIT Technology Review. It's time to get on the bus!