Subj : Re: extreme programming (thoughts)
To   : comp.programming
From : matt
Date : Thu Jul 21 2005 04:10 pm

philip,

> Pairing is more efficient than training newbies offline, catching
> bugs in QA, designing on paper, etc. all totalled together.

well.. hate to say it but if that were so clearly the case, we wouldnt
be having this discussion, would we? :) in the history of programming,
this has not yet be proven to be the case. subscribing to darwinist
economics, this will surely be proven, if true.  personally, i think it
will only be cost-effective if we offshore it to people already working
for a third the price of US domestic IT workers, which certainly may be
the trend.

> Prevention is better than a cure.

you will never eliminate debugging. as long as humans are flawed, code
will be flawed. as will test cases, and other unforseen circumstances.

to me, the key is finding *balance*, a trade-off between extreme unit
testing, and reasonable error-handling w/ logging. 


matt

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