Summary

In this chapter we took everything we ve learned throughout the book and refactored XP into something that we feel to be altogether more robust. The process that we ended up with, though it still has striking similarities, just isn t XP anymore. However, son of XP should be applicable to a much wider variety of projects than the original.

Of course, we aren t attempting to invent a new methodology in a single chapter. It s important to take our advice not as a definition of a methodology, but as a set of guidelines for what to look out for and tailor when applying an off-the-shelf methodology (or when creating your own). Some more advice for tailoring methodologies can be found in Alistair Cockburn s book Agile Software Development .

XP isn t the only fruit, even if it is the loudest. There are plenty of other agile methodologies to choose from: Scrum, ^[22] the Crystal series, ^[23] DSDM, ^[24] FDD, ^[25] and so on. Even RUP ^[26] can be made agile in the right hands. We would also point you toward Agile Modeling, ^[27] which addresses many of the weaknesses in XP in similar ways.

FDD, for example, offers a good mixture of up-front design and progressive design, and it has a much bigger emphasis on documentation than XP (in fact, as with ICONIX, ^[28] the documentation is produced almost as a by-product of the design process).

Well, that s about it really. XP just isn t deserving of the hype, and you may find resistance introducing XP in its entirety into your organization. But there are parts of it that can be salvaged and wrapped up into a more rigorous process, while still achieving its agile goals.

We leave you with a conclusion of sorts in the next chapter, in which we examine some of the core philosophy that we re convinced led to XP being the way it is.

^[22] See http://www.controlchaos.com.

^[23] See http://crystalmethodologies.org.

^[24] See http://www.dsdm.org.

^[25] See http://www. togethersoft .com/services/tutorials/jmcu/chapter6.pdf .

^[26] See http://www.rational.com/products/process.jsp .

^[27] See http://www.agilemodeling.com .

^[28] See http://www.iconixsw.com/ICONIXProcess.html .