Extreme Programming (or XP) is a software engineering methodology (and a form of agile software development)

Proponents of Extreme Programming and agile methodologies in general regard ongoing changes to requirements as a natural, inescapable and desirable aspect of software development projects; they believe that adaptability to changing requirements at any point during the project life is a more realistic and better approach than attempting to define all requirements at the beginning of a project and then expending effort to control changes to the requirements.

However, XP has been noted for several potential drawbacks, as compared to more document-based methodologies, including problems with unstable requirements, no documented compromises of user conflicts, and lack of an overall design spec or document (see below: Controversial aspects]]).

History

Extreme Programming was created by Kent Beck during his work on the Chrysler Comprehensive Compensation System (C3) payroll project. Beck became the C3 [[project leader in March 1996 and began to refine the development method used in the project and wrote a book on the method (in October 1999, Extreme Programming Explained was published).

Computerworld-appdev-92. Chrysler cancelled the C3 project in February 2000Fact: date=January 2008.

Although Extreme Programming itself is relatively new, many of its practices have been around for some time; the methodology, after all, takes "best practices" to extreme levels. For example, the "practice of test-first development, planning and writing tests before each micro-increment" was used as early as NASA's Project Mercury, in the early 1960s . Refactoring, modularity, bottom-up and incremental design were described by Leo Brodie in his book published in 1984.

Origins

Most software development in the 1990s was shaped by two major influences: internally, object-oriented programming replaced procedural programming as the programming paradigm favored by some in the industry; externally, the rise of the Internet and the dot-com boom emphasized speed-to-market and company-growth as competitive business factors. Rapidly-changing requirements demanded shorter product life-cycles, and were often incompatible with traditional methods of software development.

The Chrysler Comprehensive Compensation project was started in order to determine the best way to use object technologies, using the payroll systems at Chrysler as the object of research, with Smalltalk as the language and GemStone as the data access layer. They brought in Kent Beck, a prominent Smalltalk practitioner, to do performance tuning on the system, but his role expanded as he noted several issues they were having with their development process. He took this opportunity to propose and implement some changes in their practices based on his work with his frequent collaborator, Ward Cunningham.