Cannonball into XP

A few weeks ago we were finally granted to use eXtreme Programming on a new project. It's a web application with a fair amount of business functionality. We have decided for the Cannonball-approach as Kent Beck refers to in his paper “Getting Started with XP”.

We both have some initial understanding about XP and have been anxious to try it out, but haven’t had support until now. We have experience from some of the practices, but not all, and have spent the first few weeks reading up on more details, like Extreme Programming Explained (Kent Beck) and Scrum and XP from the trenches (Henrik Kniberg).

Currently we use continuous integration on all projects already, and as senior developers we have plenty of experience with refactoring. We have used the Scrum process, and thereby Stories and Iterations amongst other things. Tommy have also been experimenting with TDD for a couple of years.

As for our concerns, none of us have done much pair programming or automated acceptance tests before. Another issue is our organization at Creuna which does not map directly to XP. Being consultants having an on site customer can be difficult for example.

Commenting this post we would love to get your input on how you started with XP. Also, during this project, don't hesitate to give us comments how you would solve similar problems.