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Comment by plinkplonk | Hacker News Reader

Some context. I am considering a startup. I was blown away by the intensity of Zenter's development schedule. One of my potential co founders is a bit of a fanatic about XP but some facets of the process (especially the religious sloganeering and the use of tests to "evolve" the design ("TDD") ) seems counterintuitive. Also I am a bit concerned that the "big names" of Agile (with a couple of exceptions) don't seem to be hackers just process consultants and most of the experience they have seem to be in creating inhouse corporate software.

If anyone here has used XP or other Agile methodologies (or even fragments from it like "TDD" for e.g) in their startup efforts, please take a moment to jot down your impressions.

How important is it to have the thefounders' coding "philosophies" mesh well?

Thanks in advance.

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Some Ycombies may be using ideas promoted by XP, e.g. wide ranging automated testing, without chanting the XP mantra. I'd have thought good unit test coverage and web interface testing, e.g. twill, benefit fast site development, especially with today's dynamic languages like Python. http://twill.idyll.org/

Thank You. We plan to use both automated unit and web interface tests.

I've never heard any of them use the phrase.

Paul, That's what I thought! Thank You!

Is it also what you wanted to hear ? Personally I have had good and bad experiences with XP. XP can tremendously improve the quality of the software and moreover helps to spread knowledge of the codebase if the right guys are working together. If you have the wrong guys sitting together they will stall each other on discussions of coding style and for versus while loop efficiency. You should probably just sit together and see why the guys want to do it. If they have the right arguments and are not merely argumentative about it; you might wanna let them do it their way.

"Is it also what you wanted to hear ?"

If I "want to hear something" I will let you know in advance thank you :-) .

While it is impossible to convey all the nuances of the choice before me in a paragraph, I believe the question was very specific. - Have any of the y combinator companies used XP (and want to talk about it)? Not "Is XP a good thing? What do you think?" or "Can you confirm what I want to hear"? ;-)

I hope I don't sound rude , but if you are part of a y combinator funded startup and are using XP, I'd like your permission to mail you off thread with more questions about how you are implementing some of the practices in the context of a startup, but I am not looking for "generic" opinions about XP. I can use the internet for that.

I am sorry if the question wasn't clear enough. Thanks for your comments anyway.

No need to apologize. I think your question was clear enough. Probably my lack of sleep plus me being not a native speaker. No rudeness intended from my side either. I'm not in a YComb startup, but was part of one (non YC :-)) that went down 2 years ago. So it's probably off-topic here but I think it might be useful so I just post (also writing about might help me get over it ;-)). Our project was a rather complicated Java thing. We started off with XP and everything was sort of fine. Running short of time we decided that we had to code at twice the speed(!). No more XP, no more Java doc(!), 6 months all went fine, then 2 new people in the team, and two old people out. Actually it was 2 old out (rather unexpected) and 2 new in, which made it worse. A total mess. A generic advice: Always keep an eye on the codebase and try to spread the knowledge of it. It's not only that the wrong person might quit for whatever reason, people get sick, stranded while travelling, crazy etc ... . Best luck with your venture

no offense taken, friend :-)

I was just trying to be clear about my purpose (I am not a native speaker of English either so I am not sure how much my intent gets through)

Your experience report is much appreciated! Thanks!

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