Review by Billy Barron, Tek-Tools

"Extreme Programming Examined" edited by Giancardo Succi and Michele Marchesi (Addison-Wesley; ISBN 0-201-71040-4) is basically the proceedings from the first XP conference. The book includes 33 papers from the conference.

The book opens with Martin Fowler's "Is Design Dead?" paper, which I have previously read elsewhere. This is a very good paper because it is extremely insightful in how Martin can be a proponent of both XP and UML.

This is followed by a rather bizarre paper who Peter Merel tries to turn XP into something like Tao or Zen. Though I have studied Zen in the past, this paper didn't make much sense to me.

Other interesting papers include ones on how framework development and XP might work together and scaling XP for large projects. A couple of papers along the way I felt more or less missed the point of XP however.

This volume should not be your first exposure to XP. However, after you have read one of the official XP books, this is a nice read to get a broader perspective of XP in the large community.