Review by Billy Barron, Delphi Consultants

"Planning Extreme Programming" by Kent Beck and Martin Fowler (Addison-Wesley; ISBN 0-201-71091-9) is the second book on XP by these authors. The first (XP Explained) gave the overall philosophy. "Planning Extreme Programming" focuses more on planning and management tasks.

This book is unusual for a computer book. It is short and yet has a lot of chapters. The authors really focused on hitting a topic and getting in and out quickly. This is nice because it makes this book a fast read. Martin Fowler's books are always like this.

As always with XP, I expect that this book will stir up some controversy about how project should be run. The book ranges from Chapter 7 "Four Variables" which every project manager better understand to Chapter 20 Stand-Up Meetings which I'm sure will be widely disagreed with for several reasons. In my particular case, I think daily status meetings are a waste of time and that very targeted goal oriented sit-down meetings are infinitely more useful.

As expected, the book is full of practical advice based on the experiences of the authors. Whether or not their conclusions based on these experiences is generally applicable in the industry is and will be a matter for debate. However, this book is a worthy read whether or not you agree with the XP philosophy.