Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change

Utile ed esauriente trattato sul Extreme Programming. La tesi principale proposta è che non ha senso cercare di fare previsioni che non possono basarsi su niente altro che l'incertezza.Piuttosto, Kent Beck propone una metodologia che abbraccia i cambiamenti invece di combatterlo.Gli aspetti principali della metodologia sono:- pair programming che porta ad una maggiore qualità del codice scritto- pianificazione flessibile: scegliendo giornalmente ciò che va fatto in base alle priorità del momento- design for change - non trattare nessuna parte del progetto (comprese le specifiche) come immutabili, essere sempre pronti a modificarli quando necessario,- il codice è la documentazione e quindi va scritto in modo che possa essere facilmente utilizzato come tali,- unit test: gli unit test sono uno step essenziale per fornire codice funzionanteSi può essere d'accordo su tutto o su parte dei punti in elenco o altri aspetti del libro. È sicuramente importante prendere coscienza del problema di fondo, la pianificazione fondata sull'incertezza e provare a prendere ragionare, magari prendendo spunto proprio dalle linee guida di XP.Libro stra-consigliato.

The book treats much more about how you can improve a project in the political way (not technical). How you can lower the dev to prod cycles, how you can improve code, how to tackle the communication between business and IT, etc ...All this parts when you are technically really good emerge because they are the only painfull. Kent Back gives you a lot of bullets in order to talk with project managers that see only their budget and don't take into account all the human parts.The beginning is not really easy to read but there is so much that it's a real treasure.

If you already know XP, you perhaps want to know whether to buy this book. I'll try to answer that question.The first edition of this book marked a watershed in the way I thought about software. I did leave many questions unanswered, however, as our team struggled to implement the practices 'out of the box'. Perhaps a bit too much revolutionary zeal.The breadth of the second edition is far greater. It explains the principles so that you can adapt them to your own circumstances, without subverting their original intent. As such it is a far more usefull book than the first edition, even if it lacks the bold audacity of the former - or maybe the ideas of XP dont seem so left of field anymore.

Every professional programmer needs to read this. There is nothing about programming in this book. It’s about how to program as a professional and as part of a team.

It was only after reading this book that I realized there might be value in this "agile" thing. There's more to agile than Scrum-branded processes and tools, and XP is much more than just "agile technical practices". The XP practices are good, but it's really the values and principles that matter.