Case Study: Extreme Programming in a University Environment

Extreme Programming (XP) is a new and controversial sojiware process for small teams. A practical training course at the university of Karlsruhe led to the following observations about the key practices of Xl? First, it is unclear how to reap the potential benejits of pair programming, although pair programming produces high quality code. Second, designing in small increments appears problematic but ensures rapid feedback about the code. Third, while automated testing is helpful, writing test cases before coding is a challenge. And last, it is dificult to implement XP without coaching. This paper also provides some guidelines for those starting out with XR