Three XP Practices Your Team Already Does
If you haven’t heard of Extreme Programming (XP), here’s the tl;dr version:
XP is a philosophy of how a team can engage in software engineering founded on values, principles, and practices. Its objective is better software and happier people.
If you have heard of XP, you probably think of Test-Driven Development and Pair Programming, two of the most challenging XP practices both in ideology and in execution. You may not know it, but even if you have never even attempted these two contentious practices, your software team is probably already doing several of the other practices. Here are the top three I suspect you are already doing.
Informative Workspace
If you are using a work item tracking board or software that encapsulates your todo items as index cards, post-its, or the like, you are already practicing Informative Workspace. Whether you are co-located or (more likely due to the pandemic and the nature of software work these days) distributed, you have a common space for the team to understand the work to do. Software like JIRA, Rally, Trello, Azure DevOps, and their ken is great at making work incredibly transparent with swim lanes, burndown charts, and other information radiators.
“An interested observer should be able to walk into the team space and get a general idea of how the project is going in fifteen seconds. He should be able to get more information about real or potential problems by looking more closely.”
Stories
Your team is probably using User Stories to describe work that needs to be done. You are familiar with the “As a , I want to , in order to ” format or similar. Your team may have direct access to customers and work from this sentence to create an understanding as they plan the work, or there may be some more up-front detail such as wireframes, How To Demo, or Acceptance Criteria, etc. However, the driving force behind your work is probably a story that tells how the user interacts with the system. Chances are, you are also estimating this work up front in order to scrutinize its complexity and plan effectively.
“Plan using units of customer-visible functionality... As soon as a story is written, try to estimate the development effort necessary to implement it... Give stories short names in addition to a short prose or graphical description.”
Continuous Integration
Continuous Integration (or CI) is the dev ops practice all the cool kids are doing. Your team is likely using a code repository platform like GitHub or BitBucket and using pull requests to integrate code changes often. If you are using trunk-based development, you are way ahead of the curve here! You are likely also using a build pipeline tool to build your software and perhaps even execute a suite of tests. This practice comes straight out of XP and has been around for over two decades. It was a crazy idea back then and now it’s common sense. This practice gives us an incredible amount of feedback on the stability of our system.
“Integrate and test changes after no more than a couple hours. Team programming isn’t a divide and conquer problem. It’s a divide, conquer, and integrate problem... Continuous integration should be complete enough that the eventual first deployment of the system is no big deal.”
Bonus: Whole Team, Weekly Cycle, and Quarterly Cycle
Some more good news: If your team is using the Scrum framework, you are already doing three more XP practices thanks to some overlap!
Scrum has a concept of cross-functional teams, which simple means that the entire team possesses all the skills required to execute the work of the team. This is the same as the XP practice Whole Team. Additionally, Scrum Sprints create timeboxed feedback cycles that accomplish the same purpose as XP’s Weekly and Quarterly Cycles. It likely won’t surprise you that he most effective software engineering Scrum teams also use XP. The two frameworks complement each other incredibly.
Conclusion
You are already using XP and seeing its benefits by practicing Informative Workspace, Stories, and Continuous Integration. Scrum teams get three more for free! These leading practices prove time and again to yield the best outcomes and have become the standard for software engineering teams all over the world. There are only 13 Primary Practices in XP and you are already doing nearly half of them. Perhaps it’s time to pick up a few more and see how much more effective your team can be.
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