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Comment by seivan | Hacker News Reader

No risk, no experiments, no innovation and getting caught in a rut of mediocrity and boredom.

I love experimenting and taking chances with code and ideas. Yeah you end up spending more nights and it might take more time or it might blow up in your face but what's the point of being a programmer if you can't push limits.

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This is actually a good point. In XP this is one of the reasons you do spikes. Often you will throw away all of your rigour when you do a spike and just see what comes out the other side. Then you throw away the code and reimplement it using your rigour. That way you get the best of both worlds with a small penalty of having to do some rewrites. It takes a considerable amount of discipline, though, to throw away working code when people are screaming at you to deliver ;-)

Haha, I thought it needed more discipline to keep working coder as I keep renaming and rewriting.

You can certainly experiment and innovate. Nothing about agile stops you from adding an issue to spend half a day investigating the right tool to solve a problem, or implementing something two different ways to determine the best one. But by explicitly defining that objective and blocking out time to do that you de-risk the development process related to it.

These "extreme" processes force you to define the motions (issues, work tasks) and allow you to practice getting them done using the same process over and over again.

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