Kent Beck has been posting snippets (I assume) from the 2nd edition of his book, Extreme Programming Explained, in the XP Yahoo! group lately. Here's one nugget of gold:

Work only as many hours as you can be productive and only as many hours as you can sustain. Burning yourself out unproductively today and spoiling the next two days' work isn't good for you or the team.

Where does this penchant for long hours come from? I'm often asked for "scientific" evidence for the practices in XP, as if science could somehow bear the responsibility for project success or failure. Work hours are one area where I wish I could turn this argument around. Where is the scientific evidence that members of a software team produce more value in 80-hour weeks than in 40-hour weeks? Software development is a game of insight, and insight comes to the prepared, relaxed mind.

...

You can make incremental improvements in work hours. Staying at work the same amount of time but managing that time better is an improvement. Declare a two-hour stretch each day as Code Time. Turn off the phones and email notification, and just program for two hours. That may be enough improvement for now and may set the stage for fewer hours at work later.

Kent Beck

ThoughtWorks has come up with a new open source project, Selenium, that develops a JavaScript-based browser-embedded test engine for running FIT-like tests in a browser. That's a very interesting idea, although I wonder how well their use of IFRAME fits with the goal of supporting such a wide array of non-IE browsers.

Anyway, kudos to the team, keep it up, and all that. There's always room for a good tool.

Last week, Kent Beck posted to the XP Yahoo! group (sorry, can't provide a link since the website is "temporarily unavailable") the "new" principles he's listed in Extreme Programming Explained, 2nd edition:

• Humanity
• Economics
• Mutual benefit
• Self-similarity
• Improvement
• Diversity
• Reflection
• Flow
• Opportunity
• Redundancy
• Failure
• Quality
• Baby steps
• Accepted responsibility

That list certainly does look "different" from what it was in the "1.0 era" books. Yet, it's not. I'm anxiously waiting for my copy...