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In September 1999 I started working for a new company. I hadn't got a PC yet, so instead of having me sitting around doing nothing, they send me off to a Rational course on OOAD. I already knew Rational tools and I was pretty used to OOAD, but I sure sounded better than staring at the wall. One day, during lunch, I was talking to one of the Rational consultants giving the course and somehow he mentioned XP (this weird methodology they invented at Chrysler, he said). Probably because I was ranting about Daily Build and Smoke Test as I had learned it from Microsoft. The main thing he seemed to remember about XP is that XP said you should only do something if it produced value for the customer.
Back at home I looked XP up in some search engine and began reading. I still think the best introduction is the original C3 article published in the Distributed Computing magazine. After that, I'd recommend Don Wells' intro (see below).
At the beginning I had a lot of doubts. Not only about how to do it, but also about the soundness of the whole XP idea. I discussed a lot with my colleagues, read some more, discussed some more, etc. The following article is the result of those discussions.
In Defense of Extreme Programming.I've also written an article on Pair Programming. Some people
believe Pair Programming is unproductive. I think that believe is
based on a wrong assumption. This idea is explored further in:
Pair Programming is Pair Development
(still work in progress).