One XP Experience: Introducing Agile (XP) Software De-
velopment into a Culture that is Willing but not Ready
F. Grossman1
J. Bergin1
D. Leip2
S. Merritt1
O. Gotel1
Pace University1
Computer Science & Information Systems
{grossman, berginf, smerritt, ogotel} @ pace.edu
IBM2
Hawthorne Lab – Corp. Webmaster Team
Leip @ us.ibm.com
Abstract
The main question to be asked is "Does Extreme
Programming (XP) make sense as a development
methodology in a diverse, multidisciplinary web
development environment? This environment
includes diverse, and perhaps, distributed teams
requiring close coordination with multidiscipli-
nary skills -- information architecture, visual de-
sign, XML, Java and others. The potential is to
make the development process more responsive to
users' needs and changing business requirements.
This could have high impact on outcomes of the
development process, decreasing cost, decreasing
time to deployment, and increasing user satisfac-
tion. The challenges are to adapt and reconcile the
corporate and the agile culture processes and
methodologies without seriously compromising
either. We will discuss our experience from con-
ception into implementation of XP through the
first release that incorporates several iteration
cycles. We will discuss the positive and negative
forces and how they have or have not been re-
solved to date.
1 Introduction
Corporate software development teams, such as
IBM’s own internal web development teams, have
traditionally used heavyweight waterfall method-
ologies for developing most web-based applica-
Copyright © 2004 Dr. Fred Grossman, Dr. Joseph Ber-
gin, and IBM Corp. Permission to copy is granted pro-
vided the original copyright notice is reproduced in
copies made.
tions. This has worked well in many situations but
less well in others. In particular, it is not suffi-
ciently responsive to changing requirements or to
situations in which the ultimate clients have diffi-
culty stat