From cards to code

This paper discusses Extreme Programming (XP), a relatively new and increasingly popular ‘user-centred’ software design approach. Extreme Programming proposes that collaborative software development should be centred on the practices of programming. This contrasts sharply with more heavily instrumented, formalized and centrally managed software engineering methodologies. The paper maps the interactions of an Extreme Programming team involved in building a commercial organizational knowledge management system. Using ethnographic techniques, it analyses this particular style of software development in a given locality, and how it uniquely hybridized documents, conversations, software tools and office layout in that locality. It examines some of the many artifices, devices, techniques and talk that come together as a complicated contemporary software system is produced. It argues that XP’s emphasis on programming as the core activity and governing metaphor can be understood only in relation to competing overtly formal software engineering approaches and the organizational framing of software development. XP, it suggests, gains traction by re-embodying the habits of programming as a collective practice.