Chapter 32. Challenges for Analysts on a Large XP Project

Gregory Schalliol

The author recounts the fundamental issues encountered by a team of eight analysts on a 50-person, multiyear development project that converted to an XP process. Those issues include the importance of comprehending the whole application in addition to the parts, the art of dividing the whole into meaningful story cards, the sometimes complicated role of the customer, and the place of more traditional analysis. In describing the team's responses to these issues, the author suggests what challenges analysts might expect in large XP projects.

In Kent Beck's groundbreaking book Extreme Programming Explained, the word "analysis" does not appear in the index, and Beck explicitly warns against trying to use the methodology for large development projects [Beck2000]. I, however, am an analyst using XP on a large development project, and the point of this chapter is to show that I am not completely foolish for having played such a role.

Traditional wisdom would say that such a project is not a likely candidate for an XP approach, and the bulk of my chapter recounts the difficulties we encountered with XP on this project and the ways we dealt with them. Despite these difficulties, however, and despite our deviations from some core XP practices, I show how we experienced sufficient success to recommend similar methodologies for large projects in the future.