Using old and inefficient techniques like waterfall while building modern software applications can become extremely dangerous in today's fast-paced business environment.
The main reason is that competition is enormous, things change lightning fast so businesses and IT teams need to find ways to work closely, maintain their flexibility and adapt fast.
Extreme Programming is a great recipe that solves these issues and helps us to build complex and useful applications while maintaining strong collaboration bonds with our customers. Let's see why.
The problem
As an IT team, how often do you come across new requests from the customer's side that force you to refactor heavily or do things from the ground while a project runs?
As a customer, how often do you realize that you actually need something different compared with the things you asked for upfront while a project runs?
Business needs are doomed to change
We need to realize that we tend to build even more and more complex software applications so not being able to predict everything upfront is quite possible to happen.
Actually, this is the most common one.
So the 1.000.000 dollars question is "How can we describe, estimate and foresee all these things that are not known or described in full detail yet, and might be required in the near future?"
We simply cannot!! We are not wizards that can tell the future, right?
The solution
Extreme Programming is an approach that helps hugely to minimize this risk and bring the 2 worlds closer.
This Agile model helps us have small iterations, work side-by-side with the customers and adapt fast to their growing needs without worrying about error-prone estimations, newly introduced requirements, or last-minute changes.
With XP methodology we can provide value to our customers constantly while adapting to various requirements that were not visible or even described at first.
XP improves a software project in five essential ways:
- communication
- simplicity
- feedback
- respect
- courage
Through these principles, customers and IT people come closer, build stronger bonds, stay constantly on the same page and work for a common cause all the way long.
Let's build useful stuff together then. Cheers!!
