Book review: Extreme Programming Explained

Nowadays, “everybody” is working agile – so I was curious about the beginnings.

I read the book Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change by Kent Beck and Cynthia Andres.

Well, if you ask any 10 developers about their work – sooner or later, they will say the following things: agile, Scrum, waterfall…

Most probably, they won’t say anything about Extreme Programming. I never worked on any commercial project precisely as it is described in this book. It’s probably not going to happen.

I have already worked on quite a lot of projects and worked with quite a lot of people, different management, and clients. Sometimes, even a basic “Scrum” was hard to apply. Why am I saying “basic”? Because most of the time, there are some customizations in the team – and based on the rules of Scrum – if you change anything about the framework – then it’s not Scrum anymore.

(“The Scrum framework, as outlined herein, is immutable. While implementing only parts of Scrum is possible, the result is not Scrum. Scrum exists only in its entirety and functions well as a container for other techniques, methodologies, and practices.” – Scrum guide)

So what about this book? Well, it was a great book to read. But, still, it is too optimistic. If you want to apply XP, you need to convince everybody to align with it. It’s going to be complicated. HARD!

Although, I believe in the values this book says to do as mandatory.

Some of these are:

• pair programming sessions;
• development testing;
• turning the problem into smaller problems;
• automated system-level tests;
• the teams should be able to grow and shrink without catastrophic consequences;
• etc.

Maybe you did not know, but I’m a certified Professional Scrum Master (PSM II). In the beginning, I mentioned Scrum. The reason is that the things mentioned in this book (Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change) can partially be found in Scrum.

In conclusion, I’m not saying it’s a mandatory read for everybody – instead, it’s great to know about these standards.