Mayford Technologies - XP Practices

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Extreme Programming Practices - The Planning Process

Plans are worthless, planning is essential.
Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower

One of the myths about Extreme Programming is that it is disorganized coding with no regard to planning. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, planning is one of the more important aspects of XP, and occurs all the time. On any agile project, you will perform considerably more planning over the lifetime of the project than with traditional processes.

The XP planning process allows the customer to define the business value of desired features. Cost estimates provided by the programmers are used to choose what needs to be done and what needs to be deferred. The effect of this planning process is that it is easy to steer the project to success.

The planning process in XP can be described a list of steps that are repeated for each release:

The User Stories are written, prioritized and estimated

Release Planning selects the stories to be completed, and creates the schedule

The project is divided into Iterations of 1-3 weeks, implementing the highest business value stories first

Iteration Planning starts each iteration

A Standup Meeting starts each day, keeping the whole team on the same page.

The Project Velocity is measured during the iteration.

Retrospectives are performed at the end of each Iteration and Release.

For more information about Extreme Programming, visit our Resources page.