Extreme Programming Practices: What's on Top?

by Laurie Williams

About five years ago, Extreme Programming (XP) emerged as a software development methodology and became an alternative to the existing heavyweight and plan-driven approaches. It had become clear that the current methodologies just didn't work for some projects. Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant Kent Beck, in conjunction with Ward Cunningham and Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant Ron Jeffries, thought outside the box, and thus XP was born. At the time, industry and technology were moving very quickly, and time-to-market pressures were mounting. As customers became increasingly unable to definitively state their needs up front, Beck et al. realized they had to do something different.