With C3 back
on schedule Don
moved back to Ford Motor Co. This time he was to help a financial
application get back on track. The application was the Vehicle Cost and
Profitability System (VCAPS) that calculated how much it actually cost
to build a car or truck. It was in trouble because of serious quality
and performance issues. More time was spent fixing bugs than adding
required features.
The
first big change Don made was to write a unit test framework and create
the first unit tests. It was a "white knuckle" assignment because he
had two weeks to write code and one week to debug. The unit
tests
and framework took the entire first two weeks to finish. But
once
the unit tests were in place the actual code only took one week to
write, no debugging needed. The assignment was brought in on
time with none of the expected bugs. This was a good start.
As the
number of unit tests grew management noticed a one third reduction in
production bugs. At that time Don was able to set up an integration
station and began continuous integration and collective ownership. More
Extreme Programming (XP) practices were introduced until the second XP
project was running. As production bugs dropped even further the team
became more productive eventually reaching a factor of ten times. This
second XP project verified that XP was a viable process and C3 was not
just an anomaly.
Soon after
leaving the VCAPS
project in 1999 Don created the
www.extremeprogramming.org website. At that time information on
the XP process was either