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Extreme Driving (XD)

If you've never heard of Extreme Programming (XP), you probably just won't get it. As a matter of fact, you might not get it anyway, but that's ok.

XD is a deliberate and disciplined approach to driving motor vehicles. If everybody just tries to drive whatever way, it will take longer to get anywhere, and there's more of a danger of a crash. That's why you must have and follow a driving methodology.

First of all, it's absolutely essential to have lots of "Call Up Meetings," which involve everybody calling and talk to each other on cellphones while driving. Never drive without them.

"Collective Mechanical Ownership" is another critically important concept of XD. It means that any driver must have access to change the mechanics in the vehicle at any time. So if one person wants to get in and rewire the starter, or another person decides to change the spark plugs, there doesn't have to be centralized oversight of all that.

And don't forget that you need to Unit Test every single step of the drive. The Unit Test consists of using a separate vehicle to attempt performing each action in advance, just to see if the performance of the action really results in the action being performed. For example, before turning left around a corner:

  • Stop and exit the vehicle being driven.
  • Enter and start the test vehicle.
  • Perform the action of turning left around the corner.
  • Verify that you have actually turned left around the corner.
  • Stop and exit the test vehicle.
  • Go back, re-enter, and restart the actual vehicle.
  • Actually perform the real left turn, now that the action has been tested and you're sure it will be safe and efficient.

And last of all, at the heart of XD, is the principle of "Pair Steering". Pair Steering simply means that two different people have their hands on the steering wheel, steering the motor vehicle at the same time. This way, if one person makes a steering mistake, the other person, having more specific experience in that area of steering can correct it immediately. Also the steering gets done much faster when the workload is divided up and shared- the old "divide and conquer" strategy.

Thank you.

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