Short Definitions Of Xp

Like blind men's descriptions of an elephant, these are our personal short definitions of XP...

XP involves as one team, in a sustainable process without imposed overtime, developers working in pairs who truly enjoy their work, and an informed and available customer to whom they regularly deliver releases. The system's design is clearly described for all by a forceful metaphor, driven by a comprehensive suite of developer and customer tests, and kept simple and understandable by constant refactoring and coding to uniform standards under the team's collective responsibility. This turns out to be a lot of fun and counter-intuitively effective.

A software development team uses the set of Extreme Programming rules as it would a traditional methodology. Team members work in pairs, work closely with an on-site customer, maintain a full test suite they always keep working, and continually refactor their jointly-owned code to keep it clean. These and other XP rules allow team software development to be fun and effective.

XP is a process that enables developers to rapidly produce quality maintainable code, and to focus exclusively on producing business value for their customer. XP gives the business leaders high visiblity of actual, measured, project progress, in terms of business value delivered. XP gives business management, the customer, full and complete control of project direction.

It also happens to be sustainable and enjoyable for everyone involved.

-- by contrast --

XP puts an end to coders dictating limitations on business processes.

XP puts an end to developers "holding the business community hostage" to get their way -- be it playing with cool technologies or just taking too long to develop software.

XP developers never "go dark." There is no "90% done for 90% of the project." You can always see exactly where the project is. The project can always deliver all software value invested to date. Business management is always in complete control of project direction.

(With apologies to Kent Beck) XP is turning up all the knobs of Software Development to "eleven".

CategoryExtremeProgramming