What does a typical extreme programming project look like?
The first thing you’d notice is that all the programmers are in a room together, usually sitting around a large table in the middle of the room. The programmers may have desks or offices nearby, but you can tell by where the books are piled that the big table is where the action is. XP teams work in a series of fixed iteration cycles. Iterations typically last 1, 2 or 3 weeks each depending on the team. (A given team will almost always use same the iteration size for every iteration.) At the beginning of each iteration, the team gets together with the customer for a planning meeting. In that meeting, they go over the features the customer wants done in that iteration, breaking each feature down into individual engineering tasks. Individual developers then sign up for specific tasks, and estimate those tasks. No developer is allowed to sign up for more work in the coming iteration than he completed in the previous iteration. During the rest of the iteration, the team will implement the
