More Likely to Use Scrum

I've been making my way through Agile Software Development Ecosystems by Jim Highsmith. This book provides an overview of agile software development methodologies and includes a brief description of the 7 most common methods. Of these seven, Extreme Programming (XP) was the most familiar to me. The biggest problem I have with XP is that it advocates pair programming. That idea in itself isn't the problem. The difficulty lies in trying to convince upper management that having two developers at one computer is an effective use of resources.

Instead, I prefer Scrum. This agile methodology advocates short release cycles with an emphasis on locking in a set of change requests every 30 days, so that developers can focus on what they're doing. The relatively short period also gives business owners the opportunity to change course and not feel like they're locked in to a large chunk of development that isn't going to meet their needs.

I would, however, borrow XP's ideals of building the simplest thing possible that solves the current problem and to not trying to anticipate future needs. And I'm also a proponent of refactoring when it makes sense to do so which is also an element of XP.