One XP experience: introducing agile (XP) software development into a culture that is willing but not ready

TLDR

The web‑development environment involves diverse, distributed teams with multidisciplinary skills, and while XP promises greater responsiveness to user needs and reduced cost and time, integrating it with existing corporate processes poses significant challenges. The study examines whether Extreme Programming is suitable for a diverse, multidisciplinary web‑development setting, by reviewing its implementation from conception through the first release and assessing resolved and unresolved challenges. The authors describe their XP implementation process, covering conception, multiple iteration cycles, and the first release.

Abstract

The main question to be asked is Does Extreme Programming (XP) make sense as a development methodology in a diverse, multidisciplinary web development environment? This environment includes diverse, and perhaps, distributed teams requiring close coordination with multidisciplinary skills -- information architecture, visual design, XML, Java and others. The potential is to make the development process more responsive to users' needs and changing business requirements. This could have high impact on outcomes of the development process, decreasing cost, decreasing time to deployment, and increasing user satisfaction. The challenges are to adapt and reconcile the corporate and the agile culture processes and methodologies without seriously compromising either. We will discuss our experience from conception into implementation of XP through the first release that incorporates several iteration cycles. We will discuss the positive and negative forces and how they have or have not been resolved to date.