Extreme Programming and other agile methodologies consist of prescribed practices. Some of these agile practices are based on previously established best practices. Practitioners and educators feel confident in using and teaching these best practices. In other cases, agile practices alter or depart from best practices. These are the harder practices to adopt and to have the confidence to teach. The authors in this section share experiences and techniques for teaching agile practices and transitioning teams to their use.
Part III begins with chapters written by university educators who have used various XP practices in the university classroom. First, in Chapter 21, Owen Astrachan, Robert Duvall, and Eugene Wallingford discuss their experiences in integrating XP into their classes. These educators have developed an innovative form of "pair programming" by having the instructor play the role of the driver. Jointly, all the students in the class play the role of the navigator and guide the teacher to a successful program implementation. Additionally, they have increased the number of "releases" required of their students to provide more timely and increased feedback. Last, they have introduced refactoring as a means to improve understanding of programs and design patterns.
In Chapter 22, Mike Holcombe, Marian Gheorghe, and Francisco Macias describe their experiences in integrating XP into their senior-level course on software engineering projects. In this course, the students build real projects for real clients. Customer satisfaction and high quality are essential because maintenance is virtually impossible as the students graduate and leave their projects behind. The authors report success and a positive student response. Dean Sanders shares students' mostly positive perception of XP and XP's practice of pair programming, based on a pilot course, in Chapter 23. David Johnson and James Caristi share similar experiences in their software design course in Chapter 24. These two educators describe their successes and offer some suggestions for future use of XP in a software design course.
Chapter 25 presents the experiences of Ann Anderson, Chet Hendrickson, and Ron Jeffries in running their tutorial on user stories and the planning game. This chapter is extremely valuable for both educators and developers.
Joshua Kerievsky contends that XP's values of feedback and communication support continuous learning. This learning can enable personal and process improvement. In Chapter 26, Joshua suggests that XP be augmented with a learning repository and organizational support for study groups and iteration retrospectives.
The concepts of the XP release planning practice can be difficult to sell and internalize with students and professionals, including developers and businesspeople. In Chapter 27, Vera Peeters and Pascal Van Cauwenberghe present a playful but effective interactive game to teach these concepts. While planning the game, participants experience firsthand user stories, estimation, planning, implementation, functional tests, and velocity.
In Chapter 28, Moses Hohman and Andrew Slocum discuss an innovative practice they term "mob programming," a variant of the XP pair programming practice. With mob programming, groups larger than two work together to refactor code. Employing this practice, their team has strengthened its use of other XP practices, such as pair programming and automated unit test cases. They have also further embraced the XP values of communication and courage.
"Show me the money." Some managers and practitioners remain skeptical of agile practices and methodologies. They desire proof before transitioning from their "trusted" practices. In Chapter 29, Laurie Williams, Giancarlo Succi, Milorad Stefanovic, and Michele Marchesi offer an empirical model for assessing the efficacy of agile practices and the impact of their use in creating quality software.
