Monthly Meetings

Sept. 24, 2003

Topic: “Using Extreme Programming Practices to Maintain Legacy Systems”
D oes a traditional development organization need to make fundamental changes to utilize Extreme Programming, or can it work it into ' business as usual ' ? The presentation will describe what happens when XP practices are applied to maintaining a seven-year-old, C-language-based legacy system in a traditional development environment.

The system, which provides document control, routing, and approval functions over the web, is used extensively and is at the heart of the organization ' s ISO9000 Quality Management System. The most recent traditional development ' maintenance release ' took almost 14 months to deliver, and created a huge backlog of problem reports and enhancement requests.

An attempt is underway to apply XP practices to eliminate the backlog. How is it working, what does it look like? The first release completed last month, and the second release will complete (we hope ;-) on the day after the presentation. Not all practices are being applied, and some have been modified. It may not be a pretty sight to an XP ' purist ' , but attend and see for yourself. You just might find a way to try out XP without reorganizing the whole development environment.

About the Speaker:

Tip House, Chief Systems Analyst, OCLC Online Computer Library System. Tip has lots of experience (25+ yrs) in software development (programming, QA, testing, management, marketing, etc.), has developed lots of different systems (database, compiler, client/server, test/CM, web, etc.) on lots of different platforms (micro, mini, mainframe, PC, Unix, Linux, etc.) in lots of different application domains (scientific, banking, e-commerce, information, yada, yada ), and has lots of certifications (okay, three: quality analyst, quality engineer, ticket auditor).