Extreme Programming - History

History

Extreme Programming was created by Kent Beck during his work on the Chrysler Comprehensive Compensation System (C3) payroll project. Beck became the C3 project leader in March 1996 and began to refine the development method used in the project and wrote a book on the method (in October 1999, Extreme Programming Explained was published). Chrysler cancelled the C3 project in February 2000, after the company was acquired by Daimler-Benz.

Although extreme programming itself is relatively new, many of its practices have been around for some time; the method, after all, takes "best practices" to extreme levels. For example, the "practice of test-first development, planning and writing tests before each micro-increment" was used as early as NASA's Project Mercury, in the early 1960s (Larman 2003). To shorten the total development time, some formal test documents (such as for acceptance testing) have been developed in parallel (or shortly before) the software is ready for testing. A NASA independent test group can write the test procedures, based on formal requirements and logical limits, before the software has been written and integrated with the hardware. In XP, this concept is taken to the extreme level by writing automated tests (perhaps inside of software modules) which validate the operation of even small sections of software coding, rather than only testing the larger features.