« Planning extreme programming

This weekend I’ve managed to read Planning Extreme Programming by Kent Beck & Martin Fowler, I’ve been rather impressed by the book, the first edition is dated October 2000 so it’s almost 10 years old now, in this post I’ll share some notes I’ve taken during the reading, mostly related to the similarities with Scrum.

XP population

Kent and Fowler launched a survey on the XP mailing list asking which size of an iteration was more popular, they got only 37 replies, in these days the list has around 9000 users, with hundreds of messages every week…

Practises

Stand-ups meetings, release planning, iteration planning, concept of done: all well described here.

Have a short meeting once a day so everybody knows what’s going on, and what’s not.

At the end of each iteration, the whole team would gather round and watch the developers demo the work in which each had been involved in the preceding three weeks.

A story is done when the function of that story is demonstrated to the customer and the customer agrees that the functionality substantially fulfils what is expected.

Graphs

There are no burn down or burn up charts, but few graphs are suggested (including Story Progress, does it sounds familiar?)

There’s no backlog but the stories are prioritized and the ones with lower priority put into a drawer.

Wrap future stories with a rubber band and stick

them safely in a drawer.

Pairing

Pairing is mentioned just a couple of times (I’m sure just because is implied), and the first time at half of the book.

Retrospectives

There’s even a first idea of retrospective:

If you have the ceremonial pushing of the acceptance test button

at lunch on the last Friday of the iteration, you can spend the rest of the day talking about your process.

Scrum master

There’s no scrum master, indeed, scrum wasn’t born but the tracker role sounds a lot like the SM one…

This person, the tracker, keeps an eye on which tasks are done and

how much is left on outstanding tasks.

Fine grain tracking

Last but not least there’s a mention to the pomodoro technique:

(Francesco Cirillo told us he bought a half-hour kitchen timer in the shape of a tomato, so they now refer to a “six-tomato task.“)

Conclusions

Great book, it gave me the impression that Scrum just adds some names and defines in a deeper details ideas and practises that have been written years before.

I’ve just started to read Agile Project Management with Scrum to better understand what Scrum really adds, XP, so far, honestly seems to me more lean than Scrum.