When XP Projects End

In theory, an XP project would never end but just continue to evolve. In real life, your project will probably lose funding one day, being deemed either complete or so far from what the customer wants that they're starting again from scratch. If you're producing software for an external customer, you're likely to reach a point where you turn the software over to that customer. Here are some encouraging observations from an early project for an external customer Lisa worked on, which sold her on the value of XP.

During the project, programmers from the customer's development team rotated through and paired with our programmers to learn the code. Various members of the customer team had participated in writing and running acceptance tests each iteration. The next-to-last day of the project, nobody worked late. Our tasks were complete!

On the last day, various members of the team presented information to the customer team. The programmers described the system's architecture, using the whiteboard and answering questions from the customer development team. I explained our approach to testing and went over the acceptance test suite, how to run it, and how to view the results.

We videotaped the whole thing, so the customers could refer to the whiteboard drawings and the question-and-answer sessions in addition to reading the documentation we wrote and burned to CD for them. Our customers satisfied, we knocked off early and went to celebrate over beers.

Lisa's friend John Sims had the following epiphany when he read Extreme Programming Explained: "I saw that software projects didn't have to end in disaster and burnout for everyone and that there was a way of developing that could allow me to do my best, if I'd let go of some of my current understandings of how to develop software. In short, it changed my mind about how to write software."

Well, yeah! This is why we practice XP.