Practicing And Exploring Extreme Programming

Since 1960s, a lot of software development methods have come out with the development of software engineering, such as waterfall model, spiral model, incremental model, etc. In 1990s, CMM appeared. It even gives the evaluation indexes for the process management of software development. But the phenomena such as projects' postponed and the cost exceeding the budget is still very common. Many software project teams are swamped by the continuously increasing process of development. To solve these problems, a lot of experts in software industry summarized some values and principals that make the developer teams response to the change quickly. They called themselves Agile Alliance. Those methods are wholly called as Agile Methods.Extreme Programming (XP) is one of the most popular agile software development methods. For most of the small-scale software projects, because of the pressure of cost and schedule, the developer teams often simplify the traditional "heavy-weight" methods at random. The results are not so good. This is a kind of common phenomenon in domestic software companies. XP is a rigorous "light-weight" development method. It can solve most of the problems during the process of development. So the perspective of its application is very good. There is a lot of difference between XP and the other traditional software development methods. Many developers may be unadapted to the method at first. How to apply is a problem which needs to be solved urgently. If the teams can not comprehend the core spirits of XP, the application will become very difficult. It will even bring the negative influence to the development process.It is necessary that applying XP bases on the fact of the project. By properly tailored and extended, XP can show its advantages in software development process in maximum and ensure the success of the software project. Basing on the viewpoint, this article gives the solution of how to practice XP completely. According to the actual condition in a real project, the article explains how to implement the XP practices completely and guides how to use correlative tools. After fully apprehending the core spirits of XP, the author extended the scope of XP practices by adding three new practices-pair testing, shift position and simple modeling. Moreover, it summaries the key factors to implementing XP-will, habit, human resource, in proper sequence and tools. Only proper attitude and reasonable behavior for thesefactors lead to maximum success.