What Problems That Manifest in Your Typical Software Project Are Being Targeted by XP?

Typical problems that threaten to afflict just about every software project include the following:

• Lack of communication between programmers.

• Lack of communication between programmers and the customer.

• Sometimes the customer doesn t know what he wants until he sees it.

• Customer requirements aren t static. They re likely to change during the project, either because they have genuinely changed (e.g., the market has shifted) or because they weren t right in the first place.

• Much time is often wasted on writing functionality that turns out not to be needed after all, either because the design evolved in a different direction or because the requirements changed.

• Documentation quickly becomes out-of-date.

• Sometimes, when a project takes a very long time to complete, it s obsolete before it has even been finished.

This isn t an exhaustive list, but it gives a good idea of the type of problem project that XP is aimed at. Whether it succeeds in solving these problems is wide open to debate, of course. We return to this list later in the book.

XP isn t alone in identifying these as common problems. Even traditional waterfall-based projects have ways of solving many of these problems (e.g., they have a prototyping phase that helps to identify the best design and gives the customer a chance to see roughly what she s going to get).

There s an increasing trend in modern processes to travel light. For example,-the ICONIX Process ^[21] is concerned with getting from use cases to code in as few steps as possible. ICONIX also identifies which documents are transitory (i.e., which documents can be abandoned once used), and which documents should be kept up-to-date. XP places an even higher emphasis on temporary documents, to the extent that the only deliverable that really matters is the source code.

^[21] Doug Rosenberg with Kendall Scott, Use Case Driven Object Modeling with UML: A Practical Approach (New York, NY: Addison-Wesley, 1999).