Chapter 20. Extreme Maintenance | Extreme Programming Perspectives

Charles Poole and Jan Willem Huisman

This chapter examines some of the problems experienced by IONA Technology's Orbix Generation 3 maintenance and enhancement team and how the adoption of Extreme Programming (XP) has further improved the team's ability to deliver quality support and enhancements to the products they work on. The issues identified and discussed are common issues for companies moving from the start-up pressures of time-to-market to those related to supporting large numbers of customers with bug fixes and enhancements to existing applications in existing deployment scenarios.

The chapter briefly reviews the history of the team's development and maintenance practices before implementing the XP practices. It then focuses on how XP was implemented and used to resolve some of the identified problems. Results are detailed as both a qualitative view on the XP project and the impacts on morale, along with some of the quantitative analysis related to productivity and customer satisfaction. This experience has shown that XP is a viable and very successful model for teams involved in pure maintenance and enhancement of a legacy code base.