Previous History Of Playing To Win

The original vision of this book in early 1999 was...

Extreme Programming: Playing to Win

by: KenAuer, KentBeck, WardCunningham, MartinFowler, RonJeffries

To be published later this year by Addison-Wesley.

A practically oriented presentation of the XP practices for project planning and testing.

How's this coming?

A lesson we learned is that Wiki is a great tool for collaborating on a book when you're all in the same room, but we weren't able to make it work for collaborating remotely. We are currently looking at how to make progress, both technologically and by further focusing the book on planning. Turns out we didn't know as much about testing as we thought. --KentBeck

From VlissidesOnBeck

[KB:] Anyway, the second book is called Playing to Win, and we quickly realized we had to cut down its scope---we couldn't talk about all the practice of XP. So we thought up the worst situation we could be in before adopting XP: The project is already late, morale is dropping, management and the customers are getting nervous. Then we asked what XP book we'd write for someone in that situation.

Well, the two things you've got to do to get things under control are planning and testing. You've got to be able to measure where you are today---that's the testing part. And you've got to be able to present alternatives for tomorrow, so the business can start steering projects---and that's the Planning Game stuff. So the second book is going to cover those two topics in depth.

How's it coming? (Jan 24, 2000)

KenAuer has taken the lead on this. Various subgroups are off working on other projects in between supporting Ken. KentBeck and MartinFowler are writing a ProjectPlanning? book "SteeringAndPlanningExtremeProgramming". RonJeffries is writing an installation guide for XP "ExtremeProgrammingInstalled".

(May 1, 2000) The book has evolved to become advice to those who want to start on the XP adventure from those who are already on it. In addition to the meat of the project contributed by KenAuer and WardCunningham, along with contributions from the other three named authors, there are snippets of advice/experiences from others who have been there and done that.

For the latest, see ExtremeProgrammingPlayingToWin.