Agile project management with XP Manual

MANUAL GESTIÓN DE PROYECTOS ÁGILES

Agile Project Management with External Programming (XP)

1. Where does XP come from?

Agile methodologies are used to carry out many projects, both development and other types of projects of any nature. There are many particularisations of agile principles in the form of concrete methodologies and best practices. Scrum and Kanban are the best known concrete methodologies in the world of software development and technology project management. Scrum can be considered as a set of guidelines and best practices to coordinate the work of all team members. Development based on iterations, planning for each sprint, involving the client, short but frequent meetings, etc., are aspects of project management and coordination. Experience has shown that applying these good practices favours the successful development of projects. As you may have already noticed, in the Scrum methodology there is practically no mention of software development. It talks about building a product that has to fulfil a set of properties requested by the customer. However, this product does not necessarily have to be a software product. For example, agile methodologies have been successfully applied in the collaborative development of books. In general, when the product to be developed is eminently intellectual, and cannot be precisely defined "a priori", an agile methodology such as scrum can be applied. This is because scrum puts the emphasis on coordination, decision- making, definition during the creation process, etc. Although they can be applied in certain projects, it is true that they have had their maximum expression in software development. However, agile methodologies such as Scrum or Kanban make virtually no mention of the technical issues involved in software development. And that is precisely the gap that extreme programming occupies. To understand extreme programming, you need to know the history of how it was developed. In the 1980s, programmer Kent Beck began working with SmallTalk, an object- oriented language, which was born with the aim of bringing the human reasoning process closer to the reasoning process used in software development, with the goal of making software easier to create and maintain. Kent Beck and his collaborator, Ward Cunningham, began testing various practices in software development with the SmallTalk language. Some of these, which we will discuss in detail later on were continuous integration, refactoring of European Open Business School

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