Research Hypotheses

Ron and Kay decided to try XP on this project, to test whether adhering to the principles of XP would help them overcome the major deficiencies they'd encountered on many other projects. They also believed that using XP would create a stronger team and an experience that they would remember with pleasure.

By the end of the project, all three authors had learned that XP had given them the ability to schedule the release with surprising accuracy, clarify the requirements as the project went along, write good code without spending time on debugging, and have an enjoyable team experience without working a lot of overtime. This was only half of the story, however. To get the other half of the story, Dan performed retrospective interviews with the other team members and with upper management to determine their interpretation of the experience. Their opinions were mixed. Some of the developers liked XP, some of them didn't, and the project was not really viewed as a success by management. Some conclusions drawn from this "mixed review" are presented at the end of this chapter.