| Average Rating: |
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| Sales Rank: | 127535 (lower is better) |
| Price as of: | 10/06/2008 4:14:22 PM MDT |
| Price Used: | $6.33 |
| Shipping: | Free Shipping on most orders over $25* |
| Availability: | Usually ships in 24 hours |
| Label: | Addison-Wesley Professional |
| UPC: | 785342710915 |
| Pages: | 160 |
| Binding: | Paperback |
| Publication Date: | 2000-10-26 |
| Published By: | Addison-Wesley Professional |
| ASIN: | 0201710919 |
| Category: | Book |
Simplicity is the watchword of the XP software process. This book is virtually devoid of traditional software-engineering jargon and design diagrams, and yet does a good job of laying the foundation of how to perform XP--which is all about working with a customer to deliver features incrementally.
The terminology in the book is commonsensical. (In the terms of XP, each iteration adds certain new features, or stories. It's up to the customer to decide what functionality is more important and will be delivered first. By never letting a working build get out of sight, the XP process virtually ensures that software will be close to what the customer wants.)
Early chapters borrow analogies from everyday experience--like planning a trip or driving a car--to set the stage for XP process planning. The book has plenty of advice for dealing with the stakeholders (customers) of a project. Because of confidentiality agreements, however, we don't get many details from the real world, although the discussion is anchored by a hypothetical project for planning the Web site of the future for travel, with some specifics.
There is plenty of advice for planning projects, based on individual and team "velocity" (a measure of productivity) and the like--practical suggestions for running daily, short status meetings (in which all of the participants stand up, to keep them short). Clearly, there's a culture that surrounds many XP teams, and this text does a good job of conveying some of this to the reader.
At fewer than 150 pages, Planning Extreme Programming is notably concise, and that's probably the whole point. Most shops today work on Internet time, which doesn't wait for extensive project analysis and design documents. In XP, you create working software from the very start. This book is an essential guide to anyone who's working in XP shops or who might be interested in what this innovative, iterative software process can offer. --Richard Dragan
Topics covered:
The content of the book covers all aspects of planning, managing and tracking progress on an XP (Extreme Programming) project and is a worthy companion to Kent Beck's anthemic XP Explained. Hard stuff missed out from the earlier work such as how to estimate how long things will take, how to write user stories and how to organize the details of iterations and releases is explained in a straightforward way. It also introduces a few new key XP concepts, showing that this radical methodology didn't spring fully formed into the mind of Beck, but is still evolving. One such key is "Yesterdays Weather", the idea that you can't go far wrong by using past performance as an initial guess for future results.
If you are at all intrigued by the new "agile" methodologies, read XP Explained and then this one. Then buy a few more copies for your management.
This book has a lot of content not found in any other XP book that I own. The gold nuggets in here are useful for project management for years to come. It's a 5 star for sure.
- How exactly to plan releases? What if frequent releases aren't appropriate and marketing demands to release once a year?
- How exactly to write user stories, and how to handle them? Although the reader may find some sample stories in "Extreme Programming Installed" by Ron Jeffries, Ann Anderson and Chet Hendrickson, the stories in the "Planning Extreme Programming" are used as core elements in the whole planning process, shown as example.
- How exactly to build the iteration plan and the release plan? How to track an iteration?
I would also like to recommend "Extreme Programming Applied: Playing to Win" by Ken Auer, Roy Miller, Ward Cunningham. I think this is the most practical book on XP ever written.
I would also like to recommend the titles about individual XP aspects:
- Design Improvement: "Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code " by Martin Fowler;
- Test-Driven Development: "Test Driven Development: By Example " by Kent Beck;
- Sustainable Pace: "Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency" by Tom DeMarco;
- Pair Programming: "Pair Programming Illuminated" by Laurie Williams and Robert Kessler;
- Whole Team: "Agile Software Development" by Alistair Cockburn;
- Planning Game: "Planning Extreme Programming" by Kent Beck, Martin Fowler;
- Small Releases: "Software Project Survival Guide" by Steve C McConnell.
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