Have I Joined a Cult?

I'm contracting at Wordtracker at the moment. Their product is facinating but just as interesing is their working philosophy.

Management is based on Peopleware by Tom Demarco and Tim Lister, and Slack by Tom Demarco. What this amounts to is a massive, light office where overtime is discouraged and everyone works on flexitime for above-average pay. The thinking is that if your workers are happy and moral is high, they will be more productive, flexible and likely to stay with you, saving you training and orientation costs. It's about effectiveness over efficiency. This is hardly rocket science but I've worked for a number of people who could have done with this advice, and the number of companies who neglect their primary resource is terrifying.

To complement this new age management style, they also practice Agile Development, Extreme Programming and Regression Testing. Agile means that the company's direction is reassessed every few weeks, allowing for flexible but co-ordinated responses to obstacles as they appear. It also empowers the employees - giving them a clear sense and say in where they're going. Now, I've never had any interest at all in management so the fact that I'm using words like 'empower' is scary in itself.

The XP and regression testing seem to go very well together. One of the Wordtracker developers is the chap who wrote SimpleTest, one of the biggest testing frameworks out there for PHP. I've had a few pairing sessions and I'm starting to get both the XP philosophy and unit testing. The amount of time I would have spent wading through documentation, let alone writing any code, is reduced to nothing by having an experienced developer looking over my shoulder. I was a proper developer once upon a time and the reason I left it was the intangible nature of back-end programming. I got very frustrated with days spent staring at code and nothing to show for it. Having your tests written before you start not only keeps you on track, it also gives you a real sense of motion. There's no risk of me going back to programming but it's been nice to find that I can still enjoy it.

I was trying to explain this stuff to some people over the weekend and I could hear that to an outsider I'm sounding like a proper crazy. Have I joined a cult without realising?

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