Jim Newkirk and Ward Cunningham - What is Extreme Programming?

The Discussion

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  I've read a lot about xp, good and bad, but not had a chance to really implement it.  However, I have found some of the ideas to be quite helpful- mostly the feedback loop and work process breakdown.
  
  It's cool to get inside what these two see as the spirit of xp.  Nice video!

• 

  We use xp at my company and it has had a profound impact on our ability to meet customer requirements. Using the XP techniques of story meetings, estimates, value, test first, and pair programming in short, focused iterations, we are able, with a relatively small development team, to release regular, predictable, and valued updates to our applications.
  
  We're currently developing new versions of our five Windows clients and a server product for Windows and six flavors of UNIX.There is no way we could be actively all of these products at a company of our size without XP.

• 

  It is interesting to me that we have sort of adopted XP principals without really trying to go out there and pick the one paradigm that would solve our particular problems. In fact we are doing XP development but it was sort of an accident.
  
  Some of that accident is because we are small and the tenents of xp development seem geared towards small/tight groups of developers. Other parts of the accident just seemed to be a good way to avoid the 'Thats not what I asked for' syndrome and the 'well I am waiting on the formal spec' attitude that I had been exposed to before starting with my current employer.
  
  I would also say that todays development environments play a role in the accidental adoption of XP style development methods, they provide that special grease that lubes up the skids on the XP development sleds....
  
  

• 

  Jim and Ward,
   The only problem people ran into with any development processes are:

  1. Management – Let me be in charge attitude

  2. Communication –playing a broken phone and assumptions on the parties involved.

   

  So, many times I ran into so much Politics within the company that it is not even funny. No matter what methodology you would use it would not work until on ALL levels of the “FOOD CHAIN” are agreed on the objectives.

  
  The advantages of XP are:
  
  1.Involment of the end-user in the development processes. Consulting companies always ended up to be isolated from the end-user. This is huge project risk.

  2. Small amount of documentation or just docs that are needed to communicate the point across boundaries.

   

  I agree that XP mostly works for small teams. One reason for it is that people have to get alone and stop playing politics in order to succeed.

   

   

  Keep up good work, guys

  [www.ipattern.com do you?]