Synopses & Reviews
"XP is the most important movement in our field today. I predict that it will be as essential to the present generation as the S.E.I. and its Capability Maturity Model were to the last."
--From the foreword by Tom DeMarco
The hallmarks of Extreme Programming--constant integration and automated testing, frequent small releases that incorporate continual customer feedback, and a teamwork approach--make it an exceptionally flexible and effective approach to software development. Once considered radical, Extreme Programming (XP) is rapidly becoming recognized as an approach particularly well-suited to small teams facing vague or rapidly changing requirements--that is, the majority of projects in today's fast-paced software development world.
Within this context of flexibility and rapid-fire changes, planning is critical; without it, software projects can quickly fall apart. Written by acknowledged XP authorities Kent Beck and Martin Fowler, Planning Extreme Programming presents the approaches, methods, and advice you need to plan and track a successful Extreme Programming project. The key XP philosophy: Planning is not a one-time event, but a constant process of reevaluation and course-correction throughout the lifecycle of the project.
You will learn how planning is essential to controlling workload, reducing programmer stress, increasing productivity, and keeping projects on track. Planning Extreme Programming also focuses on the importance of estimating the cost and time for each user story (requirement), determining its priority, and planning software releases accordingly.
Specific topics include:
- Planning and the four key variables: cost, quality, time, and scope
- Deciding how many features to incorporate into a release
- Estimating scope, time, and effort for user stories
- Prioritizing user stories
- Balancing the business value and technical risk of user stories
- Rebuilding the release plan based on customer and programmer input
- Choosing the iteration length
- Tracking an iteration
- What to do when you're not going to make the date
- Dealing with bugs
- Making changes to the team
- Outsourcing
- Working with business contracts
In addition, this book alerts you to the red flags that signal serious problems: customers who won't make decisions, growing defect reports, failing daily builds, and more. An entire chapter is devoted to war stories from the trenches that illustrate the real-world problems many programmers encounter and the solutions they've devised.
0201710919B04062001
Synopsis
Focuses on the time and cost for developing each user's story and determining its priority, and planning software releases accordingly. Covers such topics as outsourcing, making changes to the team, dealing with bugs, and working with business contracts.
Specific topics include:
Planning and the four key variables: cost, quality, time, and scope.
- Deciding how many features to incorporate into a release.
- Estimating scope, time, and effort for user stories.
- Prioritizing user stories.
- Balancing the business value and technical risk of user stories.
- Rebuilding the release plan based on customer and programmer input.
- Choosing the iteration length.
- Tracking an iteration.
- What to do when you're not going to make the date.
- Dealing with bugs.
- Making changes to the team.
- Outsourcing.
- Working with business contracts.
In addition, this book alerts you to the red flags that signal serious problems: customers who won't make decisions, growing defect reports, failing daily builds, and more. An entire chapter is devoted to war stories from the trenches that illustrate the real-world problems many programmers encounter and the solutions they've devised.
Synopsis
In this timely follow-up to Extreme Programming Explained, software engineering gurus Kent Beck and Martin Fowler show exactly how to plan your next software project using Extreme Programming (XP). KEY TOPICS: Planning is a vital element of software development -- but all too often, planning stops when coding begins. Beck and Fowler show how to make software projects far more manageable through a series of simple planning steps every project manager and team leader can easily perform >every day. The book follows XP projects from start to finish, presenting successful planning tactics managers and team leaders can use to adjust to changing environments more quickly and efficiently than ever before. This book is full of war stories and real-world analogies, and offers actionable techniques on virtually every page.MARKET: For every project manager called upon to deliver reliable, high-value code in "Internet time."
Synopsis
Without careful ongoing planning, the software development process can fall apart. Extreme Programming (XP) is a new programming discipline, or methodology, that is geared toward the way that the vast majority of software development projects are handled -- in small teams. In this new book, noted software engineers Kent Beck and Martin Fowler show the reader how to properly plan a software development project with XP in mind. The authors lay out a proven strategy that forces the reader to plan as their software project unfolds, and therefore avoid many of the nasty problems that can potentially spring up along the way.
About the Author
Kent Beck consistently challenges software engineering dogma, promoting ideas like patterns, test-driven development, and Extreme Programming. Currently affiliated with Three Rivers Institute and Agitar Software, he is the author of many Addison-Wesley titles.
Martin Fowler is the Chief Scientist of ThoughtWorks, an enterprise-application development and delivery company. He's been applying object-oriented techniques to enterprise software development for over a decade. He is notorious for his work on patterns, the UML, refactoring, and agile methods. Martin lives in Melrose, Massachusetts, with his wife, Cindy, and a very strange cat. His homepage is http://martinfowler.com.
Table of Contents
Foreword.
Preface.
Acknowledgments.
1. Why Plan?
2. Fear.
3. Driving Software.
4. Balancing Power.
5. Overviews.
6. Too Much to Do.
7. Four Variables.
8. Yesterday's Weather.
9. Scoping a Project.
10. Release Planning.
11. Writing Stories.
12. Estimation.
13. Ordering the Stories.
14. Release Planning Events.
15. The First Plan.
16. Release Planning Variations.
17. Iteration Planning.
18. Iteration Planning Meeting.
19. Tracking an Iteration.
20. Stand-Up Meetings.
21. Visible Graphs.
22. Dealing with Bugs.
23. Changes to the Team.
24. Tools.
25. Business Contracts.
26. Red Flags.
27. Your Own Process.
Index. 0201710919T04062001