Microsoft's Ward Cunningham offers his two cents to OOPSLA attendees on the benefits of extreme programming and other software-development techniques.

VANCOUVER, B.C. &— Ward Cunningham, the father of the wiki concept, hardly mentioned wikis at all during his keynote address at the OOPSLA 2004 conference here.

Instead, Cunningham focused on programming patterns and practices during his hour-and-a-half keynote address on Tuesday. His talk, "System of Names and Other Tools of the Not-Quite Tangible," was as intangible as its title implied.

Cunningham — who joined Microsoft about a year ago — currently is an architect with the company's Patterns & Practices Team. Before joining Microsoft, Cunningham already had dabbled in all kinds of programming, including object-oriented-, extreme- and agile-programming ventures.

Cunningham said at the outset of his talk that he intended to try to connect the many threads that led up to the development of the wiki. (A wiki is a program that allows people to create and maintain Web pages collaboratively.) Cunningham walked attendees through some of his thought processes around software patterns and linking patterns together via his "system of names" approach.

Cunningham emphasized the need for programmers to abandon the lone-wolf approach and instead work more collaboratively. He said the WikiWiki Web is all about nurturing collaboration by allowing developers to elaborate when writing patterns or other pieces of software.

Ward also emphasized the importance of pair-programming, or teaming up of developers, when writing code. Pair programming is one of the concepts that is key to the discipline of extreme programming (XP). Other XP tenets include working on small releases, simplifying software design; testing first; collective ownership; and continuous integration.

Cunningham advised OOPSLA attendees to work with colleagues and pace themselves when writing software "to avoid fatigue and self-doubt, which cripple decision making." He also advocated that programmers trade roles to maintain balance and break development projects into smaller chunks.

"Manage complexity like debt," Cunningham told attendees. Using this analogy, he likened skipping designs to borrowing money; dealing with maintenance headaches like incurring interest payments; refactoring, which is improving the design of existing code, like repaying debt; and creating engineering policies like devising financial policies.

This article was first published on microsoft-watch.com.

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