Chapter 30. Extreme Adoption Experiences of a B2B Start-Up

Paul Hodgetts and Denise Phillips

This chapter presents the results of adopting XP at an Internet business-to-business (B2B) start-up. We discuss our motivations and goals for adopting XP and the context under which the adoption efforts were evaluated. Then we present the results in terms of objective metrics and subjective evaluations. The results indicate that the project conducted under XP demonstrated significant improvements.

Escrow.com faced extreme challenges as a new Internet start-up. The business-to-business e-commerce market was, and remains, immature and rapidly changing. Time-to-market was critical to establish the business and gain market share. Quality was essential for the company as a provider of regulated online transaction settlement services.

This chapter discusses our experiences in adopting XP. Escrow.com was in a unique position to compare nearly identical projects conducted under both XP and non-XP processes. By collecting a small set of simple metrics, we were able to measure the relative success of the adoption effort. As we'll see, even under difficult circumstances, this adoption effort produced tangible improvements over the prior project.

Extreme Programming has gained considerable fame and acclaim over the past several years. Although the published body of theoretical and how-to knowledge has grown quickly, more experience reports are needed to provide convincing evidence of XP's effectiveness in real-world project contexts. This report strives to contribute to this body of evidence.