Extreme Programming Review

XP is a discipline of the business of software development that focuses the whole team on common, reachable goals. XP teams develop and produce quality software at a sustainable pace.

XP brings accountability and transparency to software development.

XP provides different practices to software development team to improve their performance and quality, following are some of the practices introduced by XP:

– Testing early, often and automated: Unit testing
– Incremental design: design everyday
– Daily deployment
– Customer involvement: immediate feedback
– Refactoring
– Continuous integration
– Short development cycles
– Incremental planning

Using above practices day-to-day help us to reduce our development stress and improve our development quality.

Practices are evidence of values, values such as communication, simplicity, feedback, courage, respect, as well as other values like quality-of-life, safety, security and predictability. XP embrace these values.

There are principles that guide XP. It follows principles to build a bridge between values and practices. Principles based on humanity, economics, mutual benefits, self-similarity, improvement, diversity, reflection, flow, opportunity, redundancy, failure, quality, baby steps, and responsibility.

We use the principles to understand the practices better and to improvise complementary practices. Understanding the principles gives you the opportunity to create practices that work in harmony with your existing practices and your overall goals.

XP became to make life better for programmers.