How to Get Started

I l @ ve RuBoard

Many developers will read this book and see that a number of Web XP practices are not very far off from some of the things they are doing already. When we first started getting into XP, our coach Chet Hennrickson told us that we were already doing XP in our graphical design process. From there we tried a practice here and there before making the full commitment to go XP. We would urge anyone considering Extreme Programming for their Web projects to do the same.

Start with how you engage with customers. If you are in a fixed-price, fixed-scope arrangement, you will have to fake it for a while. All your stories will be predefined but you will be able to let your customer decide in which order they are done. Call it the "Planning Game Lite." Your customer will welcome getting working code in regular iterative releases and will like getting to set priorities.

The goal here is for them to learn about the benefits of XP and to feel like part of the team. If you can build up trust, then perhaps your next phase of development can be under an iterative work-effort driven contact instead of fixed price and/or fixed scope.

Next you will want to experiment with paired development and writing your first unit test. Do these at the same time to get the team working together and sharing what is learned as all of you stumble through your first few tests.

Get help. Find a coach who has experience in XP to help guide the way; this person can be someone who works onsite with the team or just someone who the team can email with questions. Failing a warm body, this "coach" could be one of the online XP communities or a local XP users group ; most major cities have an XP meeting every month.

Finally, change the way you build Web sites. If you take only one thing away from this book, let it be to say goodbye to HTML and start following the XML patterns we have defined here. In our experience, this has made the most difference.

I l @ ve RuBoard