The Passionate Programmer

Tip 28

Eight-Hour Burn

One of the many sources of controversy around the Extreme Programming movement is its initial assertion that team members should work no more than forty hours per week. This kind of talk really upsets slave-driving managers who want to squeeze as much productivity as possible from their teams. It even kind of upset programmers themselves. The number of hours worked continuously becomes part of the developer machismo, like how many beers a frat boy can chug at a kegger.

Bob Martin,^[13] one of the Extreme Programming community’s luminaries, turned the phrase around in a way that made it much more tolerable for both parties while staying true to Kent Beck’s original intent. Martin renamed forty-hour workweek to “eight-hour ...