XP emerged in the late 90’s and has been adopted by many Developers. The thrust of XP is that the customer gets what he wants, when he wants it, even when the spec changes late in the project.
XP is based on a set of proven practices that are desigen to work together, althou many folks do pick and chose. These practices include things like:
- Make small, but frequent releases
- Develop in iteration cycles
- Don’t put in anything that’s not in the spec(no matter how tempted you are to put in functionality “for the future)
- Write the test code first
- No killer schedules; work regular hours
- Refactor(improve the code) whenever and wherever you noitce the opportunity
- Don’t release anything until it passes all the tests
- Set realistic schedules, based around small releases
- Keep it simple
- Program in pairs, and move people around so that everybody knows pretty much everything about the code