Programmers love the programmer-centric technical practices common in Agile development at large, most of which are derived from the programmer-pleasing method called Extreme Programming. That's fine, but do they work? Those who pay for development to occur are often unmoved by anecdotal evidence and lyrical descriptions of the beauty of "well factored" code. They want objective evidence.

It is starting to appear. It is possible to measure certain properties of code, and on the one hand, correlate them with project factors known to have economic merit (such as reduced defect rates) and on the other, with certain of those programmer-pleasing practices.

This session surveys some of the emerging evidence that we can measure the effect of the technical practices of Agile development, and explores what we might be able to do about it to our benefit, both as programmers and as inhabitants of projects.