eXtreme Programming In A Hostile Environment
Graham Wright · 2002
As the use of XP grows a debate is emerging about what type of software projects it can be successfully applied to. This paper describes the successful adoption of XP in a project combining five of the features that are generally considered hostile to the implementation of XP; a large team, a legacy code base, C++, COM and a GUI intensive application. Such factors are generally presumed to make XP practices such as refactoring and test first design difficult. Despite these problems the company described has successfully adopted XP, bringing products to market written in Visual C++ and with a heavy GUI and COM reliance. This was achieved with a programming team of twenty and with a large legacy code base. This experience demonstrates that XP can be applied to projects not usually considered to be appropriate and scaled up beyond the generally accepted limit. This success is important to the XP community because these features are common to many Microsoft based projects, projects that form a significant proportion of today’s software industry.