This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz
by Laurent Bossavit.
Original Post: Jumping straight to code ?
Feed Title: Incipient(thoughts)
Feed URL: http://bossavit.com/thoughts/index.rdf
Feed Description: You're in a maze of twisty little decisions, all alike. You're in a maze of twisty little decisions, all different.
Cleverly hidden in the chapter "Lifecycle of an ideal XP Project", we find the following recommendation from Kent Beck in Extreme Programming Explained:
You are done with exploration when the customer is confident that there is more than enough material on the story cards to make a good first release and the programmers are confident that they can't estimate any better without actually implementing the system.
Now, "You are done with X when Y" does not necessarily mean "You are NOT done with X until Y". But it is perhaps wise to read it so.
An XP team would, however, expect to get through exploration rather faster than a team planning to g through a more formal process of requirements elaboration. An XP team usually assesses the risk of speculative overdesign as larger than the risk of insufficient initial exploration of the requirements. To an XP team, the correct way to mitigate the latter risk is to have exploration of the requirements continue throughout the project.