What to Do Next

In retrospect, though a couple of our customers did read the white book, we felt that it would have been useful if we had created a brief "XP owner's manual," perhaps a few pages long. Such a document would include some items intended to educate the customer, such as the following:

• Planning game Story creation, deferring in-depth discussion of each story until it is selected or needs clarification to be estimated

• Acceptance tests Expected customer input; what happens at the end of an iteration

We would use other items as a checklist for discussion, such as the following:

• Bug fixes Prioritizing bugs, possibly assigning them as stories

• Documentation and status Determining how much documentation and reporting is essential

We also found that many aspects of our process worked better as we developed more trust in our relationship with our customers. With future projects, we would like to focus on whether projects with repeat customers do indeed bear out this observation.