Adapting Extreme Programming to Research, Development and Production Environments

Abstract

Affinium Pharmaceuticals engages in early-stage pharmaceutical R&D and molecular biology production processes for internal and external programs. This business requires significant informatics support in terms of small- and large-scale software, tool integration and data management. Obtaining suitable software is difficult due to customer diversity, rapidly evolving unique needs, vendor offering and high costs. Adapting the XP approach and practices for this situation, Affinium’s Informatics group has successfully developed in-house software that has kept up with the science. I describe notable accomplishments, and lessons learned along the way. I propose that a small in-house group of domain-aware developers, using a customized version of XP, would achieve better results than external providers, despite limited access to resources. In closing, I suggest that this structure and methodology are generally applicable to dynamic research, development and production environments.