Chapters 16-18
Ron Jefferies, Ann Andreson, Chet Hendrickson
Editors: ?
Summary:
In Chapters 16-18 the authors provide a detailed list of guidelines on how to create good software. Among these guidelines are to publish progress reports frequently, take stories in order, and practice continuous design. Most of the guidelines were discussed in earlier chapters, and the authors take this time to put the ideas together into a do and don't type list. The authors also go into detail about the importance of being able to estimate how much time a story will take to implement. Although this estimation is never perfect, programmers should be able to give better estimations on the time it will take to implement stories as they become more experienced.
The authors also discuss the importance of scope. Scope should be continuously monitored to make sure that the team is not overwhelmed with stories to be implemented. The easiest way to measure scope is to use a bar graph where each bar represents the number of stories in each iteration and the shaded region of each bar represents the number of completed stories.
Discussion:
This reading is interesting because it brought together a lot of ideas that were represented in earlier chapters of the book. However, I felt that these chapters could have spent less time on the different ways to measure progress. I think that these methods, such as the bar chart, seem like common sense and do not need to be spelled out for the reader. This work can be applied to all projects, not just those that use extreme programming. Many of the guidelines fit into software engineering ideals in general, such as publishing frequent progress reports.
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