Chapter 32. XP for Projects of Unusual Size

XP evolved with teams of a certain size in mind: usually up to eight or twelve programmers. The earlier XP published materials don't go into a lot of detail about testers and don't mention at all other common members of software projects: analysts, project managers, technical writers, graphical designers, product managers.

Using XP practices with larger projects brings a totally different set of challenges. It often means cutting teams and stories into pieces the size XP can handle. This is no easy task:

The division of the whole application into its story parts would be like cutting a whole chicken into its familiar pieces. Even though the joints may not be immediately visible, there are places to do the dividing that are more appropriate than others. But if you are cutting the chicken up for the first time … you may encounter great difficulty, because you do not know where the joints are. (Gregory Schalliol, "Challenges for Analysts on a Large XP Project")