Practice Makes Perfect

This paper presents an early empirical study on Extreme Programming practices[1] employing a qualitative action research method. The study was conducted on university students doing real commercial development projects to gain an insight into the problems faced by the new developers in adopting these agile practices. The second aim of the study is to investigate the effects of the XP practices on the quality of software developed. What emerged from the preliminary analysis was the positive relationship between number of XP practices employed and the quality of software delivered as perceived by the clients.