Chapter 34. A Customer Experience: Implementing XP | Extreme Programming Perspectives

Ann Griffin

The Internet company described here began implementation of XP as its development process in December 2000, in parallel with other significant organizational changes. This chapter describes the many physical and organizational changes that occurred both to enable XP implementation and as a result of XP implementation. Implementation challenges as well as benefits of the XP process are discussed, and recommendations are provided for those considering implementing XP.

"The Company" was incorporated in December 1999 to provide secure transaction settlement services for business and consumer e-commerce sites. "Version 1," the consumer-to-consumer (C2C) initial "gold rush" system, was developed using a two-tier architecture of ASP/VBScript with Microsoft SQL Server. "Version 2" used the "ultimate" platform, a multitier architecture with an ASP front end, a Java/EJB middle tier, an Oracle database, and XML for external interfaces and "glue."

The Company's early systems development strategy, like that of many start-ups, was to complete product as quickly as possible. The development process was ad hoc, subject to frequent change, and without clear communication between the business and development teams. Despite considerable success with the first product release, by August 2000, the Company had difficulty delivering customer requirements on time, and the financial effects made it obvious that a more standardized development process was needed.

At that time, viewed within the Capability Maturity Matrix (CMM) [Zubrow+1994], the Company was at Level 1. To summarize Level 1:

At the Initial level, the organization … does not provide a stable environment for developing and maintaining software … The Benefits of good software engineering practices are undermined by ineffective planning and reaction-driven commitment systems. [Zubrow+1994]

To correct this untenable situation, the Company decided to implement XP as its development process. Implementation began in December 2000.