By October 2000, Escrow.com was experiencing severe and growing problems in its development efforts, including a dramatically slowed pace of delivery, increasing development costs, poor product quality, and a deteriorating state of the code base. Early process improvement efforts were largely unsuccessful at solving these core problems. Senior management recognized that a fundamental change to the development process was needed. Spearheaded by a team of senior developers, research was conducted using XP. Afterward, we hypothesized that adopting XP would deliver the following benefits:
Existing project management and change control practices produced metrics that measured developer effort and defect discovery rates. Combined with code analysis, this data enabled objective measurements of the improvement from adopting XP. |