A couple of weeks ago, I was talking to a reporter about Offshoring and Extreme Programming. One of the challenges was the term, “Extreme Programming”. How do you get the ideas across as a whole unit without turning people off by the term?
Turns out, even Kent Beck is having to do that. He is calling it “Responsible Development“:
I began using the phrase “Responsible Development” on a recent tour of workshops and I really like it. I find it helpful to ask myself, “What would be the responsible thing to do now?” As an adjective, “responsible” doesn’t have any of the zip and zing of “extreme”, but I’ve grown leery of the kind of attention attracted by zippy and zingy words.
I love the idea of thinking what the most responsible thing to do now is. Personally it seems to dovetail nicely with the concept of doing the simplest thing possible. If we might know more a month from now about how to do something, is is the most responsible thing for us to guess at it now?