Lars Bendix:
Configuration Management for eXtreme Programming,
at Conference on Java and Object Orientation, Aarhus, Denmark, September 21, 2004.

Abstract:
Extreme Programming (XP) has come of age as a software development method and quite a lot of literature describes its philosophy and practices. However, Software Configuration Management (SCM) is almost never mentioned explicitly, leaving XP newcomers with the impression that SCM is not needed and SCM people with the impression that XP is not sound from an SCM perspective.

In this presentation, we will analyse XP and its practices from an SCM perspective to see if they really go against common SCM standards and best practices. In this analysis, we take into consideration that the XP context is different from that of traditional projects.

The need for SCM to support the XP practices must be made explicit in XP. We will design a number of SCM-specific sub-practices that can be added to the traditional XP practices to make XP a more complete development method from an SCM perspective.

Finally, we tell how we have implemented these sub-practices on several dozens XP projects carried out by students and our experience from doing so through several iterations.