Extreme Programming for Web Projects - Softcover

Wallace, Doug

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0201794276 ISBN 13: 9780201794274

Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional, 2002

Synopsis

Shows how the Extreme Programming (XP) software development discipline can be adapted and applied to the Web-based project development process. Softcover.

About this title

About the Author

Doug Wallace is the founder and president of Agile.Net, a consulting company that designs and develops Web sites and e-business applications using Extreme Programming and other Agile methodologies. Previously, he was manager of New Media at Passport Online and director of New Business Development and Strategy for Infinet Communications. He writes on e-business for Marketing Magazine and is a frequent guest expert on Canada's Cable Pulse 24 Money Morning television program.

Joel Aufgang is CTO for Agile.Net and an early adaptor and pioneer of XML and C# in the production of complex Web sites and systems. Prior to joining Agile.Net, he worked on many Web and software projects in both Canada and internationally and cofounded Monkeys and Typewriters, an XML and Web development consulting firm.

Isobel Raggett has been involved in Web site design and development since the beginning of the industry, and has been at the forefront of adapting lightweight methodologies to Web site development. She has worked on many Web projects, as general manager of Agile.Net and production manager for Passport Online, as well as developed her own popular fashion site.

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From the Back Cover

Web development teams have been operating in the dark for far too long. The lack of proven development methodologies for the Web environment has resulted in a constant struggle for developers to produce quality Web-based projects on time and within budget. The field is multidisciplinary in character, involving both technology and graphic design: Web-based project development must address the issue of company image, must function on multiple platforms, and must incorporate multiple media into one complete package.

Extreme Programming for Web Projects shows how the Extreme Programming (XP) software development discipline can be adapted and applied to the Web-based project development process. This book demonstrates how the hallmarks of XP--continuous integration, short iterations, paired programming, automated testing, and extensive client involvement--are particularly well suited to the unique demands of Web-based development. Based on years of real-world experience, the book offers proven best practices that enable developers to deal efficiently and effectively with the challenges they face and, ultimately, to produce Web-based projects that meet and/or exceed customer expectations.

Readers will find information on vital topics such as:

• How the XP team approach enhances communication between Web technology and graphic design professionals
• How XP automated testing ensures a comprehensive approach to testing page layout, performance, and multiplatform operation
• How XP's continuous integration and short iterations serve the Web development team's need for flexibility
• How XP's emphasis on client involvement throughout the project improves oftentimes adversarial client relationships
• How XP can facilitate the difficult task of estimating the time and cost of project completion
• How XP functionality "stories" can be adapted for Web-based presentation stories
• How XML, XSLT, and Cascading Style Sheets can help sites remain flexible and maintainable
• How to use these guidelines for outstanding Web site design and coding techniques

As the Web industry continues to mature, there is a great need for methodologies that will ensure project quality as well as efficiency and cost-effectiveness. The fast-paced and flexible Extreme Programming methodology offers an excellent starting point for Web developers to improve their working processes and employ best practices.

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Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Estimating the time and the costs of Web projects has been my obsession for more than five years. Starting with wild guesstimates and little success, I was quickly attracted to the analysis practices of the Rational Process. I spent weeks with customers doing Use Cases and Activity Diagrams, trying to define the scope of a project. However, these specifications told me nothing about the work effort involved and led to huge fights with customers over the changes they inevitably wanted.

Three years ago I went to the Software Expo in San Jose and heard Martin Fowler talk about a new set of practices called XP, or Extreme Programming. I was hooked. XP let me acknowledge the futility of estimation. It taught me about the interconnectedness of price, time, scope, and quality and about the importance of letting the customer make continuous trade-offs between the four. XP changed the rules of how I, as a project manager, engaged with customers and overnight it improved my customer relationships and my bottom line.

If estimation was my obsession, then development was my curse. Every project seemed to be going fine and then stalled at 90 percent. It would take us three months to do 90 percent of the work and six months to do the last 10 percent. Once completed, the sites we were building were a nightmare to maintain, and I lost many good programmers who would rather abandon ship than babysit a mass of unintelligible, brittle code. Developing sites in iterations and using unit tests made a lot of sense but didn't translate naturally to Web development. While the pure coding server-side issues melded well with XP, we had client-side issues, graphic design issues, and serious conflicts in trying to use a practice meant for object-oriented systems on inherently non-object-oriented Web page architecture. If Web projects were going to use XP, then XP would have to change and so would the way Web sites were structured and developed.

Over the last two years, we have experimented with practices to get the most out of XP in a Web development environment. We have extended our practices to include graphic designers, interface programmers, copywriters, and the rest of the diverse team that goes into building a Web site. We have developed new design patterns for Web site creation using XML, Cascading Style Sheets, and XSLT to impose an architecture that better supports continuous integration and the separation of content, graphical design, and functionality.

We highly recommend that readers of this book first look at Kent Beck's original XP book, Extreme Programming Explored, to see the origins of the XP practices described here and to better see where his and our practices differ.

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Edition details

• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0201794276
• ISBN 13: 9780201794274
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 192