What to Do Next

• Organizations considering XP may benefit from the Company's experience by considering these points.

• XP will provide a superior development methodology. It will not replace the need for market research, a strategic plan, and sound business decision making, nor will it mitigate the effects of poor business practice.

• Training for all affected staff, from executives on down, is vital.

• Get buy-in from key participants, including the development team, before implementation. If you fail to do this, be prepared to pay a price that will undermine XP's performance in your workplace. Consider hiring a change management consultant to assist.

• Make the necessary physical changes to the workplace to foster two key tenets of XP: pair programming and constant customer-developer communication.

• Keep the customer in charge of what is developed and when.

• To demonstrate quickly the benefits of XP, implement it first on a new project with no legacy code.

• If implementing XP on software that has legacy code, be prepared to take extra time to write unit tests and to refactor that code.

• Reward people for their efforts.

• Create documentation that meets your corporate needs. Beware, however, of slipping back into the "old ways" of wanting all functionality defined before anything is developed.

• Collect data and share it.

• XP is not only for developers. It is essential that customers at all levels understand it and embrace it.