Extreme Programming Installed Ch 16-18

Reference Information:

Title: Extreme Programming Installed

Author: Ron Jeffries, Ann Anderson, Chet Hendrickson

Editor: Addison-Wesley Professional, October 2000

Summary:

Chapter 16 - Do or Do Not

This chapter outlines the Do's and Don'ts of the extreme programming methodology. Here are few of the suggestions.

Don't:

• Don't design the entire system before you start implementing.
• Don't produce voluminous design documents at the beginning of the implementation phase.
• Don't build for tomorrow.
• Don't separate the team into developers and designers.

Chapter 17 - Experience Improves Estimates

This chapter explains that with each iteration, valuable experience is gained which helps in projecting precise and accurate time and cost estimates for the future iterations. The important steps in task estimation are:

• Estimate each task that you sign up for.
• Estimate the total amount of time that you'll spend in coding.
• Pay close attention to the actual time spent and the estimated time.
• Evaluate how close was your estimate to the actual time spent.

Chapter 18 - Resources, Scope, Quality, Time

This chapter discusses how to evaluate resources, scope of the project, quality and time associated with the project. These four things should always be tracked and reported. Constant evaluation helps the managers to estimate how well the project is doing. It's a good idea to use standardized acceptance testing to indicate the number of successful tasks. Various tools can be used to track the resources, scope, quality and time of the project.

Discussion:

Even though these chapters had something new to add, they were mostly repetitive. On thise positive side, they were not too verbose. Tracking tools and acceptance testing was a new concept that was presented to the readers and I found it quite informative.