The Practical Guide to Extreme Programming

• Authors: David Astels;Granville Miller;Miroslav Novak
• Venue: The Practical Guide to Extreme Programming
• Year: 2002

From the Book:PrefaceThe principles of extreme programming have changed the way we think about software development.The Need to be ExtremeBoth business people and software developers often view traditional software development techniques as too slow. Business people view software as a competitive advantage, and a competitive advantage can never be realized too quickly. Software developers believe that their traditional software development processes create too much overhead in their quest to deliver this advantage as quickly as possible.The need to deliver software more quickly caused Kent Beck, Ward Cunningham, and Ron Jeffries to explore the extremes of certain development practices. The first XP project, the Chrysler Comprehensive Compensation system (code name C3), was, on one hand, constrained and, on the other, pushed to its limits. This practice was called "setting the dials to ten." The result was a breakthrough in the software development called XP.Beck was certainly the driving force behind taking this project, and the multitude of others that have followed, to the extreme, and he continues to evolve XP. His vision continues as he asks us to question the basic principles of software engineering. Naturally, many of these principles are being replaced with new and better ones. New principles, such as working with a real live customer instead of a specification, are quickly gaining acceptance in the software community. The idea of creating tests before the software is written is quickly becoming a vital part of every software development process.This book attempts to capture one point in the evolution of XP.We have examined the principles and have created what we believe to be effective practices. As a result, we believe that this short guide serves as a practical one from which to learn XP.We used some of the XP principles to write this book (adapted, of course, for book writing). For example, various things that one of our customers felt we needed to cover were written on index cards and scheduled into the iterations of the book. This book has been continuously integrated and refactored. Hopefully, you, another customer, will like the finished product.Follow UpTo obtain the code from the appendix as well as other information about this book and XP in general, we invite you to visit Saorsa Development Inc.'s web site at http://www.saorsa.com