Book Title: Planning Extreme Programming

Author: Kent Beck and Martin Fowler

Publisher: Addison Wesley

ISBN: 0-201-71091-9

Review by Barbara De Vries

Paperback

Page 8-9

Customers are afraid.

Developers are afraid.

This book tells you why, and what to do about it.

Customer Bill of Rights

• You have the right to an overall plan, to know what can be accomplished when and at what cost.

• You have the right to get the most possible value out of every programming week.

• You have the right to see progress in a running system, proven to work by passing repeatable tests that you specify.

• You have the right to change your mind, to substitute functionality, and to change priorities without paying exorbitant costs.

• You have the right to be informed of schedule changes, in time to choose how to reduce the scope to restore the original date.  You can cancel at any time and be left with a useful working system reflecting investment to date.

Programmer Bill of Rights

• You have the right to know what is needed, with clear declarations of priority.

• You have the right to produce quality work at all times.

• You have the right to ask for and receive help from peers, managers, and customers.

• You have the right to make and update your own estimates.

• You have the right to accept your responsibilities instead of having them assigned to you.

Page 16

Business decisions in planning are:

• Dates

• Scope

• Priority

Technical decisions in planning are:

• Estimates

Chapter 6 shows us that a different perspective is sometimes all that is needed. 

Consider the two sentences:

I don’t have enough time.

I have too much to do.

When you have too much to do you can:

• Prioritize and not do some things

• Reduce the size of some of the things you do

• Ask someone else to do some things

Change the way you express the problem.

We used this book at reference in a methodology workshop.  I recommend it for reference for any planning stage for a project.