Description of the Context of the Experience

Escrow.com is a provider of online settlement services. Escrow.com's services are delivered via Internet-based enterprise systems, using typical enterprise technologies including Active Server Pages (ASP), the Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE), and relational databases.

To attack the emerging business-to-business e-commerce market, Escrow.com began development of a flexible and full-featured transaction-processing engine. This project, creatively dubbed "Version 2," or "V2," was conducted using many elements of "traditional" defined processes, and required significant expenditures for personnel, tools, and technologies. The V2 project is used as the baseline for our process improvement comparisons.

To address problems with the V2 project, Escrow.com radically retooled its development process and culture. The resulting project, called "Version 3," or "V3," used XP as its development process and is the focus of this experience report.

The XP adoption efforts at Escrow.com were conducted under actual production circumstances. Because of the immediate need to address problems and the company's small size, we had neither the time nor the resources to conduct a pilot XP project. The switch to XP was immediate and complete. Following a brief, two-week preparation period, all development was conducted using the full set of XP practices.

Based on our observations, the context under which XP was adopted at Escrow.com is similar to the development environments at many small to medium-sized companies. We believe our results can be generalized to similar development environments and projects.