A Case Study in the Use of Extreme Programming in an Academic Environment

Abstract

A group of graduate students working in a lab in a university have more distractions than a typical software development group in industry. With more distractions and fewer hours on site does it still make sense to use Extreme Programming (XP) in the development of software? Here we discuss our experience using XP in an academic environment in which the members of the development group have different schedules and other projects. We found that pair programming was an efficient and effective way to learn and share knowledge, and that unit testing and just-in-time design helped us get to an early, though scaled down release. Our interpretation of pair programming felt limited and awkward at first until we realized that we could and should spend time independently learning and researching the tasks in addition to the work we do in pairs.