Exploring XP's efficacy in a distributed software development team

• Authors: Alessandra Cau
• Venue: XP'05 Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Extreme Programming and Agile Processes in Software Engineering
• Year: 2005

Since the first edition of Beck's book [1], the Extreme Programming (XP) has attracted attention from academia and industry, and its values, principles and practices are becoming increasingly popular. Strong interest in the software engineering community has generated substantial literature and debate over Extreme Programming. However, current research on the applicability and effectiveness of Extreme Programming is still very scarce and researchers and practitioners need to assess concretely XP's advantages and drawbacks. One disadvantage, which has been noted, is that Extreme Programming is more effective for small to medium size projects with co-located team. Despite such observation, Beck asserts that XP can work with teams of any size and also multi-site [2]. The main goal of this research is to evaluate the effectiveness of Extreme Programming, when the size of development team is large and distributed. There are two different approaches to investigate the applicability and effectiveness of a software method: empirical studies and simulation process modeling. These approaches are usually applied separately, but there are many interdependencies between simulation and empirical research. On the one hand simulation model generalizes empirical studies and provides a framework for the evaluation of empirical models. On the other hand, empirical studies provide the necessary fundament for simulation models because through empirical studies it is possible to collect real data to validate the simulation model. In the present research these two approaches are combined. My research is grounded on the following steps: Understand if XP values are suitable to multi-site development as they are for co-located teams. Analyze how to apply XP practices for distributed and large team and seek which among XP principles will become more important. Evaluate the applicability and efficiency of Extreme programming for large and multi-site projects using:XP-Evaluation Framework (XP-EF). It is an ontology-based benchmark which defines the metrics that must be collected for each case study and to assess the efficacy of XP [3]. The XP-EF has been used to structure several XP case studies. The XP-EF will be updated to new XP. Discrete Event Simulation Model. My research group and I have developed a simulation model to evaluate the applicability and effectiveness of XP process, and the effects of some of its individual practices. Validate results. My research will be validated on a real academic case study. This project [4] involves almost 30 undergraduates students, who work as a distributed team in an open source project using some agile practices.