Patterns for agile development practice part 3 (version 4)

• Authors: Joseph Bergin
• Venue: Proceedings of the 2006 conference on Pattern languages of programs
• Year: 2006

This set of ten patterns is intended to complement the standard wisdom that can be gleaned from the Agile Development literature such as Kent Beck's Extreme Programming Explained[1]. It is directed primarily at those who are starting out with Extreme Programming or another agile methodology and might miss some subtle ideas. Once a team gains experience these patterns will become obvious, but initially some of them are counter intuitive. While this study began in Extreme Programming practice, most of the advice applies to agile development in general. The ten patterns here extend the work of 2004--2006 on the same topic ([3] and [4]). This paper contains some of the standard practices of Extreme Programming as detailed in [1]. We consider XP to be a pattern language in which the practices are the basis of the patterns. They have the characteristics of a true Pattern Language in that they are synergistic and generative. The dozen or so practices detailed in Beck and elsewhere, such as "Do the simplest thing that could possibly work" and "Yesterday's Weather", form a subset of this language. As this "language" is in its early stages of development, there is no significance to the current ordering of the patterns here. This paper presents ten of the one hundred or so patterns developed so far. Many of these patterns are listed briefly in the Thumbnail section at the end.