PrerequisitesForXp

At Xtc20030422 we discussed what the prerequisites for Xp were. We were trying to identify the fundamental things a development team/organisation must already be doing before they can even begin to consider migrating to XP. The focus was on practices that enable teams to move to XP practices on the basis that you shouldn't try to run before you can walk.

Here are some of the things we identified:

• Source control - if a team isn't using source control then it can't practice continuous integration, collective ownership or refactoring.
• Automated build - before a team can even consider continuous integration it must be possible to trigger a complete system build that is predictable and requires no manual intervention. Teams that can't do a build without heroic effort or where an integration build represents an adventurous undertaking with unpredictable consequences are better off fixing that first.
• There must be at least one member of the team who knows what good code looks like.
• There ought to be at least one person with design experience in the language/technologies that the team will be using.