The Values of Extreme Programming

Software Values and Traditions

All too often people working in today’s software teams have little in common with each other in terms of shared values and practices. Therefore, we often find ourselves working in teams full on tension caused by people with different values being forced to tools and methods that they don’t really care about. Not surprisingly, such teams seldom produce great work.

The Agile community is trying to promote new traditions for software development; sets of values and principles supported by sharp tools and good practices

XP Values

The second edition of Kent Beck’s book, Extreme Programming Explained, defines five values that an Agile team should apply to its work:

Communication: appreciating the need for information to flow freely between everyone involved in a software project, but particularly between business and development people Feedback: ensuring that periodic small adjustments are made to the project on the basis of accurate information made available in timely fashion so that it can respond to change Courage: creating an environment that encourages people to take the sort of business and technical risks that lead to worthwhile new software, while also working to mitigate these risks and support everyone in their work Simplicity: aiming to avoid waste by creating just the simplest thing that could possibly work; a design that cannot be made simpler and yet making it more complex doesn’t make it any better Respect: recognizing the contribution everyone makes to the success of the project in order to promote collaboration, trust and honesty amongst a diverse group of people

Addison-Wesley ISBN-10 0-321-27865-8