This is the teaser post of the original review that is pretty detailed, containing images and diagrams.
Beck K., Extreme Programming Explained (1999)
Extract
The book is only 1/5 about programming and 4/5 about organizational matters. The book covers all the core and corollary elements of what is nowadays called Agile. It accompanies the other 2 Beck's books on the subject: Planning Extreme Programming (2000) and TDD by Example (2002).
Contents
- Summary
- XP Notions Hierarchy
- Values
- Principles
- Practices
- Whole XP Team (Cross-Functional Teams)
- Process Bottlenecks
- Planning via Managing Scope
- Testing
- Design
- Scaling XP
[VS] The book name is rather misleading. Roughly 80% of it is dedicated to organizational matters. This messes the book goals, makes absorbing the book material by engineering and managerial audiences hard.
The following purely engineering notions are explored in the book: Test-First Programming, Incremental Design, Automated Tests, Pair Programming, Ten-Minute Build, Code and Tests, Single Code Base.
The book is quite short. It consists of two parts: 'Exploring XP' (which describes practical, useful elements) and 'Philosophy of XP' (a series of essays on the subject). For practicality, my review does not cover the latter. However, it gets very interesting and valuable reading after you have internalized XP enough to absorb its roots.
The book sometimes uses mind maps to explain key concepts. The issue is those maps are practically unreadable. This review fixes that issue. Enjoy.
[VS]: XP (and later Agile) is not about software construction ("what to do"). It is about the elements of an organizational process ("how to do") that may or may not bring value to your specific software products.
Practically Waterfall is "what to do" and XP is "how to do" your Waterfalls.
Most of XP is pure common sense derived from production and marketing management practices 1. These practices were already well developed in organizational cultures 2 more advanced than those in Software Engineering at the time of the book's writing.
Internalize the core content of the book, consciously, selectively apply it in the daily practice and you get what many today calls Agile.
XP Notions Hierarchy
The XP notions - Values, Principles, Practices - are organized in the following hierarchy.
...continue reading at the original review.