Description of the Context of the Experience

The case I discuss is a large Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) development project that switched to an XP approach about halfway through its three-year life. In the 50-person team on this project, there are about 30 developers, eight quality assurance testers, and eight analysts. The application being built is a comprehensive, "back-end" leasing system, a product that will manage everything from the moment a lease is booked through the eventual disposal of the leased assets. This includes all aspects of accounts receivable, asset management, and lease termination, not to mention the million-and-one possible ways the laws allow people to fashion a lease for renting something to someone. The application now consists of over 500,000 lines of executable code. Our initial customer/user is the leasing arm of a traditional, Fortune 500 company, but we are partnering with that first user to offer a more generic version of the application for the leasing industry as a whole.