Have you ever heard a musician playing scales? That’s an étude (if a boring one). An étude teaches mastery through precise and careful repetition. Eventually, the étude is abandoned, but the skills remain.
Extreme Programming is our étude for software development. We hope that practicing Extreme Programming week after week will help you master agile development. Eventually, you’ll change your practices, but the underlying principles will remain.
Besides the overarching étude of Extreme Programming, we’ve included a mini-étude for each major theme of agile development. Beginning agile teams can use the études to refine their practice of agile development. As you gain experience, look deeper; use the études to help connect Part II’s detailed practices to Part III’s general principles.
These études are also useful for teams not currently practicing XP.
Either way, the études require thought to be effective. Each étude provides information, but it doesn’t tell you how to act on that information. Think about it. What did you learn from the étude? What was frustrating or exciting? How does that information affect your work? What will you do about it? Without attention and reflection—that is, mindfulness—the études are just games.
It’s no coincidence that you need mindfulness to master the art of agile development as well. You have to think about more than XP’s practices for it to be effective.
Like musical études, our mini-études work best when you repeat them. We’ve designed them to take half an hour, so you can (and should) practice them every day for a week or more. Unlike musical études, these agile exercises work best when you include your whole team. The more you all understand about the process and where everyone fits in, the better you will work together.
To start, you need a quiet work area capable of holding everyone in your team comfortably. There should be a whiteboard or wall where you can hang or post index cards between meetings. There must also be sufficient space to break into groups of two or three people and to talk softly without disturbing other groups.
We’ve found it valuable to use a timer, whether a stopwatch or a kitchen timer, to keep the session moving. Each étude has a few parts of 5 to 10 minutes. Although that time will seem to flow quickly on your first day, respect the time limits. You’ll perform the étude again tomorrow, so it’s OK if you don’t finish everything.
Choose one member of your team to facilitate the étude by watching the time (perhaps calling out “one minute remaining” when appropriate) and promoting discussion. Again, the first session may be hard, but a good facilitator can encourage everyone to continue.
At the end of each étude, we recommend spending a few minutes debriefing. What did you learn? Are there questions and ideas you can follow up on during your regular work? If you’ve been trying this exercise for more than a week, are you still getting valuable results?
If you’re new to XP and agile development, we strongly recommend that you perform each étude while you study the related chapter as a team. Besides exploring one particular theme in agile development, each étude can illuminate an aspect of how your team works together on your agile project.