Case Study: Extreme Programming in a University Environment

Extreme Programming (XP) is a new and controver-sial sojiware process for small teams. A practical training course at the university of Karlsruhe led to the following ob-servations about the key practices of Xl? First, it is unclear how to reap the potential benejits of pair programming, al-though pair programming produces high quality code. Sec-ond, designing in small increments appears problematic but ensures rapid feedback about the code. Third, while auto-mated testing is helpful, writing test cases before coding is a challenge. And last, it is dificult to implement XP with-out coaching. This paper also provides some guidelines for those starting out with XR 1.