Less Extreme Programming

Industrial practice in software engineering has developed in recent years from rigid heavyweight document-based development techniques, such as the Rational Unified Process, to incorporate more agile, iterative, communication-centric approaches such as Extreme Programming. This shift has created a need for a similar shift in software engineering education. We report our experience of incorporating an Extreme Programming option into an existing document-centric software project course. While students taking the option were generally positive about Extreme Programming, the projects' external clients had a more mixed experience.