Elegant Code » Book Review – Extreme Programming Explained

While it seems that Scrum and Lean are getting all the buzz in agile software development these days, why on earth would I want to pick up a book on Extreme Programming that has been written back in 1999? Well, it’s my current feeling that XP is the ‘core’ agile methodology. While there was some buzz around this software methodology in the late 1990s and early 2000s, it has never been commercialized nor pursued by hypesters, at least not on the same scale as Scrum and Lean.

via Elegant Code » Book Review – Extreme Programming Explained.

This is a timely and well-written review. I tend to agree that XP is still at the core of Agile practice in software. It’s interesting to me that while Scrum has hit something of an public identity crisis, the lessons of XP are still quietly gaining ground. For instance, Pair Programming was once a fiercely controversial topic. Now most programmers I talk to are somewhere on the continuum between “I pair daily” and “I’d like to try pairing/I should pair more often”.

I’ve been meaning to read this book for about ten years now; this review makes me want to bump it up the list.

2 comments

  1. I've read a number of XP books. I still like to have people, especially developers or business people that are curious about XP start out with the XP Pocket Guide. http://www.amazon.com/Extreme-
    At ~80 small pages, you can literally read it in a couple hours and it's enough information for most people to get the gist of XP.

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