Publications


Ulf Asklund, Lars Bendix, Torbjörn Ekman:
Configuration Management for eXtreme Programming, pdf
in proceedings of the Third Conference on Software Engineering Research and Practise in Sweden, Lund, Sweden, October 23-24, 2003.

Abstract:
Extreme programming (XP) is a software development method that prescribes the use of 12 different practices. Four of these practices (collective code ownership, continuous integration, small releases and refactoring) can indeed be given good support by the use of simple configuration management (CM) techniques.

We report on our experience in providing many groups of novice developers with CM education, processes and tools to support the four CM-related XP practices in their projects. True to the spirit of XP both education and processes are very lightweight and we found that it was sufficient to focus on those CM aspects that are related to co-ordination and release. Furthermore, we found that even a simple CM tool will do as long as it supports the copy-merge model to allow and support parallel work.

Overall none of the four CM-related XP practices caused any particular problems to the developers. In our case, the developers were students, but we claim (and argue) that the majority of lessons learned can easily be transferred to an industrial setting.


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