Toward an XP Evaluation Framework

Software organizations are increasingly adopting the software development practices associated with the Extreme Programming (XP) methodology. Most reports on the efficacy of these practices are anecdotal. This paper provides a benchmark measurement framework for researchers and practitioners to assess concretely the extent to which an organization has adopted XP practices and the result of this adoption. We present the initial validation of our XP evaluation framework based upon a yearlong study in which an IBM team successfully adopted a subset of XP practices that was appropriate for their team culture and their project parameters. The XP practices adopted by the team enabled them to improve productivity and to achieve a two-fold improvement in the quality of new code when compared with an earlier release. The results of such case studies in various contexts are expected to constitute a body of knowledge of systematic, empirical evaluations of XP and its practices.