
Friday Night Fight - Round 2: XP vs CMM

To follow up on the article that we published in Issue 0, WOW caught up with a couple of people to get their opinions on this debate.
Aleta Ricciardi, who co-founded Valaran Corp last year, says that their company is gearing up toward the CMM so as not to lose some of the big customers in the future, who would require them to be CMM-certified.
Giancarlo Succi  feels that XP and CMM are two orthogonal things and cannot be compared. XP is a way of doing software development while CMM is a certification. His view is that the debate is really between XP and the way CMM is being implemented in practice, not the CMM itself. 
“XP is all about lightweight processes, good communication and fast feedback. And whereas the CMM is perceived to be a heavyweight process, it is only the way it is used that is so.”
“You could be certified under the CMM while developing your product using XP. They’re both saying very similar things: configuration management is an integral part of both, XP is heavily based on testing, and CMM advocates strong test processes and while CMM wants projects to be predictable, predictability is a key to XP.” 
Giancarlo’s group uses the concepts of XP heavily in their projects, and are very successful with it. They are now starting some experiments on pair-programming across geographical boundaries.
— Nigamanth Sridhar
