Managing the Bootstrap Story in an XP Project

An ideal XP project is composed of stories defined by the customer that are of the right size and focus to plan and manage according to XP principles and practices. The reality of many XP projects is that the key story in the first release, the bootstrap story, is much larger than the rest of the stories. The bootstrap story represents the smallest deliverable kernel of the system that subsequent stories build upon incrementally. A large story creates a variety of problems: it does not fit into an iteration; there are a large number of tasks that are difficult to coordinate; and/or is too large to test adequately at the story/functional level. Teams new to XP find managing the bootstrap story especially challenging because they lack the experience required to deal with the additional planning complexity. A number of strategies exist to mitigate the problems caused by a large story. This experience report explains how our team considered adapting XP practices in order to successfully manage a bootstrap story.