Extreme Programming Pocket Guide

Foreword

This is the most important Extreme Programming book written to date. It is the most complete and concise overview of the words all Extreme Programmers use to describe what they do. Until now, those wishing to understand Extreme Programming had to piece together the lore of the movement from innovative but now overly voluminous sources. The community has grown to where it needs this book.

Extreme Programming’s roots started with a few people on a few projects taking a fresh look at what they do. It could have been any number of such small groups—the ideas of Extreme Programming have been invented over and over. But one group took advantage of the unique properties of the World Wide Web to articulate, refine, and expand their ideas in an ever enlarging community.

My own web site, the Portland Pattern Repository’s WikiWikiWeb, gave voice to this community at its founding. Wiki lets readers become writers and trusts them to organize their writing to meet their own needs. The result is a collection of terms that have very precise and universally accepted meanings, even though they may not appear so at first glance.

That is why we need this book now. Our movement is blessed with a wonderful series of books that explains the counterintuitive logic of the methods from every perspective. These books served the second generation of Extreme Programmers who were willing to buck the prevailing wisdom in order to get to a better place. But now Extreme Programming is becoming the prevailing ...