a Support Tool for Practitioners of Extreme Programming in a Distributed Environment
Richard Nieuwenhuis, Open University
The Extreme Programming (XP) software development methodology relies heavily on the co-location of the team members. The Extreme Programming team, according to the originator Kent Beck, should sit close to one another in an open environment where the whole team is able to see each other. This enables easy face-to-face communication between team members, which in turn improves team awareness, the team’s knowledge management and the social atmosphere. Nowadays, outsourcing and teleworking is becoming more common, meaning that XP practitioners need to adapt their daily XP practices for a distributed setting. XP in a distributed setting is called Distributed Extreme Programming. Research on Distributed Extreme Programming (DXP) is growing but is still relatively scarce compared to research on XP itself. In most cases the distributed XP teams have their own interpretation of DXP. These teams use (existing) tools that are a direct translation of a practice without taking into consideration that the practice may work better in a distributed environment in an adapted version. Other problems, which are mostly not tackled, are time zone or cultural differences. The social aspect, one of the key characteristics of XP, is also almost completely ignored most of the time. There is evidence, however, that upholding to certain graphical rules and functional flows will have a positive effect on the social feeling a person has with software. This means that software users can have a positive social state towards a tool, making it ideal to incorporate these types of rules in a DXP tool.
The Virtual Extreme Programming Workbench is a proposed tool that incorporates the Extreme Programming practices for a distributed environment and adheres to the XP philosophy of being social.
The social aspect of the VXPW and tackling the problems distributed XP practitioners face will have a positive effect on the software quality the DXP teams produce.
2016 Technical Paper, Richard Nieuwenhuis, Abstract
