Software Configuration Management Practices for eXtreme Programming Teams

Extreme Programming (XP) is becoming popular as a software development method and there is quite a lot of literature describing its philosophy and practices. However, in all of this literature Software Configuration Management (SCM) is almost never mentioned explicitly, leaving XP practitioners with the impression that SCM is not needed and SCM people with the impression that XP is not sound from an SCM perspective. We carried out a more profound analysis of XP and its practices seen from an SCM perspective. We found that in general XP and its practices do not go against common SCM standards, if we take into consideration that the XP context is different from that of more traditional projects. However, some SCM aspects need to be made explicit and a number of SCM-specific sub-practices need to be added to make XP a complete and sound development method seen from an SCM perspective. We report on how we implemented “our findings” on several dozen XP projects and our experience from doing this through several iterations.