The Art of Agile Development

Acknowledgments

We owe a debt of gratitude to Elisabeth Hendrickson for her contribution of the “Exploratory Testing” section. Her expertise and writing skill made the material sparkle. For more of Elisabeth’s writing, visit http://www.testobsessed.com/.

We stole good ideas wherever we could find them. Kent Beck, Ron Jeffries, and Ward Cunningham each had a hand in the ideas that led to XP, and we stole liberally from those. In addition to XP itself, Kent Beck introduced us to the idea of XP practices as études. Ward Cunningham introduced us to the notion of technical debt, a concept we use heavily. Brian Marick’s series of essays, “Agile Testing Directions,”^[1] influenced our thoughts on agile testing and the role of testers on agile teams.

James had the opportunity to work with Joshua Kerievsky on an Industrial XP (IXP)^[*] project for half a year. He learned a lot from that project; the Vision practice in particular was inspired by IXP’s Project Chartering practice. David Schwartz and Amy Schwab of True North pgs, Inc.,^[†] provided the specific vision format that we use, as well as the term project community. Their Mastering Projects workshop is excellent; take it when you have the opportunity.

Thank you to our editor, Mary Treseler O’Brien, for providing vision (where necessary), trust (where appropriate), and deadlines (where frightening). This book would not be what it is without you gently nudging us in directions different from our original ideas.

Thanks also to our army of reviewers, ...