Chapter 7. Circle of Life, Spiral of Death: Ways to Keep Your XP Project Alive and Ways to Kill It

Ron Jeffries

Extreme Programming (XP) asks teams to use a small set of carefully defined practices. These practices provide enough feedback to keep the project on track. XP projects do in fact go off track. Let's see how to keep yours on the rails.

XP begins with about a dozen practices. As teams become experienced with XP, they develop the wisdom to move beyond the basics modifying practices, adding them, replacing them. For a team that has done all the practices all the time, this evolution is quite safe and quite natural. Any process, extreme or not, works best when it is customized to the specific team, project, and moment. The process is the beginning, not the end.

Sometimes teams who haven't done all the practices all the time find it necessary to change the process or they just choose to. Depending on their general wisdom and experience, this can work well or become a disaster. You can tune XP safely based on experience. Or if your judgment is good, you can modify it right out of the box and take your chances. Here, we explore each of the XP practices, with an eye to the issues relating to changing them. The best practice, however, is to start with all the practices all the time, until they become second nature. Then try these ideas.