Customer Reviews

Extreme Programming for Web Projects

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This book is for both professional web-site development companies and for the customers who would like to order web-site development from a contractor. The book offers new way of developing web projects. The mode of operation is based on the famous methodology called "Extreme Programming" (XP). Until publication of this book, all of the non-compilation books on XP have come from those who were involved in its birth. This publication is the first title from the "second generation" of XP practitioners.

This book is self-essential. However, if you would like to know more about economic and spiritual aspects of XP, digest the "Extreme Programming Explained" by Kent Beck. Another valuable resource is "Testing Extreme Programming" by Lisa Crispin & Tip House. It exhibits valuable web testing strategies.

While the authors mostly rely on XP manifesto, they have adjusted the methodology to best fit their own needs. For example, they offer so-called zero-iteration, which sets up the framework, but have no business value to the customer. The parents of XP discourage this approach in "Extreme Programming Installed" by Ron Jeffries, Ann Anderson and Chet Hendrickson. Who are right? You decide.

To get straight to the point, I was disappointed with this book. The book opens with great promise on how XP is going to change our world and revolutionize programming projects for the web. However, Wallace, Raggett, and Aufgang end up trying to bite off more than they could chew in a 150-page book.

First, the authors assume you already know a great deal about extreme programming, which I did not prior to picking up this book. To their credit, they do refer you to Kent Beck's Extreme Programming Explored, recommending you to peruse it before reading their book. Unfortunately, this reference occurs in the Preface, and could easily be missed by readers who go straight to Chapter 1. Without this background, it's not hard to get lost - for example, the authors refer to CRC's without explaining what the acronym is or what it means - I had to check the index; indeed, CRC's are discussed (albeit briefly) much later in the book.

Not to say that there aren't positives - I enjoyed Part II, the discussion of how to integrate XP practices into a development shop. But, the authors just do not go into enough detail, and leave me wanting more. You feel that this book could have either been a 20-page paper or a 500-page book, but not something in between. A 20-page paper would have simply highlighted the differences between XP development for non-web projects versus web projects. A 500-page book would have gone into detail on a number of concepts discussed in this book. But, this slimmer volume goes in between these two choices, and ends up not really doing an adequate job of either highlighting the differences or going into a good amount of detail about XP practices.

Part III, a discussion of XML, was an awkward insertion into the text. The book goes from general management discussion to highly technical without warning, and you ask yourself within a few pages, "What the heck just happened here?" One minute they're talking about the importance of comfy chairs, and the next they're discussing recursive nested structures. It left my head spinning, and I'm not a technical wallflower. It almost seems like the authors had a 120-page book, thought it was too slim, and had to stuff an extra 30 pages in somehow.

This book whetted my appetite, and I'm now interested in learning more. Maybe I'll take the authors' advice and read Kent Beck's book to get the detailed information I'm looking for, but did not get from Extreme Programming for Web Projects.

I didn't get a lot out of the first half of this book. Part one tries to look at the basic principles and practices of XP from the perspective of a web team. Some of the material was a rehash of that found in other, better XP books such as the original, Extreme Programming Explained, by Kent Beck, or Extreme Programming Installed. The material that was new was not all that informative and I found that I disagreed with some of it.

Part two had some painful parts as well, but the whole thing started to turn around for me in chapter 8 which discusses the graphic design process from the perspective of XP core values. This chapter is excellent and worth the price of the book, although I wish it was longer. I gladly would have bought an entire book which the same premise as chapter 8. It would have been nice to see a more explicit breakdown of XP core values as they relate to the graphic design process.

Part three of the book discusses XML and XSLT as an alternative to classic web page architecture that allows for greater seperation of concerns and thus facilitates test-driven development. This is all well and good, but there are other good books on the subject, and there are an awful lot of alternatives approaches available (As a J2EE developer Apache Struts and Apache Cocoon both come to mind.) This section also could have been expanded into an entire book twice the size of this one which talked more explicitly about core XP values and practices and how XML/XSLT facilitated them. It would also be nice to see a comparison of one or more alternatives such as Apache Struts and/or .NET.

The fourth and final section of the book discusses XP practices and how these can be adjusted to a web project. Again, I didn't get an awful lot out of this. It was not clear that the deviation from standard XP practice was necessarily an improvement or that it was caused by the inherent nature of web projects so much as the inexperience of the development team relative to XP.

I would recommend this book for anyone who is NEW to XP and is starting a web project. The authors do a good job of explaining the XP process in the context of web development, but you should always start with the "white" book, _Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change_ by Beck.

However, as an experienced XPer, I did not find anything new in this book from an XP point of view and a lot of the tweaks to XP that the authors discuss, we also did on my XP web development project.

This book's premise is an interesting one: Does XP work for web projects, and if so then how does one go about implementing it? The authors are up front about the first question in the opening to Chapter 1: "Sort of" they say. The book's entire content struck me as a continuation of that statement.

The book attempts to be a bit too general in many aspects: there's a lot of high-level coverage of XP tenets without much utility specific to web development. The general coverage of XP is nice, but you'll find better content in other works; however, the authors didn't intend for this to be a seminal work on XP anyway, so that's not a big issue.

Several sections do provide good information specific to XP in web development, such as Chapter 8 (Graphics Design) and its emphasis on how to wrap customers in to the process early. Another example would be the discussion in Chapter 11 (Planning) on how the "customer" in web development differs a bit from what XP usually considers a "customer."

There's also a lot of good discussion at a high level on how the use of XML vice static HTML as data can greatly benefit the development process. There are good overviews of XML in general, XSLT from 30,000 feet, and a nice blurb on how the Tidy tool can help you keep out of trouble.

The downside of this book is that too often it stretches too far to make the connection between XP and web development. It's not detailed enough as a reference for implementing XP practices, and it doesn't do a good enough job of tying web development into XP for those looking to solve that problem.

The book is concise and well-written, but that doesn't make up for its fundamental weaknesses.

XP for Web Projects is a very good configuration the XP approach for web site and web application development. The section on user interface architecture provides a very functional and elegant framework for managing technical development and user input simultaneously. I've tested this book's techniques on real world enterprise level web application development with multiple clients and now base all my project on them.

I'm not a programmer but I work in the heart of a web team. This book brings balance to the process of creating websites and harmonizes the often confusing roles of programmers, graphic designers and the rest of the web team. Well done.

I particularly liked the graphical design process and how they have taken a very difficult process and turned it into an easy to follow and organic experience. This book has defiantly made me a better professional.

I am a programmer. I don't write Java or C# or Perl or any server side code. I am the guy that works on the interface side of web sites doing very complicated XML and XSL. This is the first book on programming that understands my role on web projects and that pure software development methodologies don't take my needs into account.

The clear online of roles and how team members can work together to create powerful websites given by this book is great. I also really liked the chapters describing how to use XML and XSL to separate content from presentation. It has given the sites I work on far more fluid structures. Hats off to Wallace, Aufgang and Raggett.

Even for those of us unfamiliar with the "Extreme Programming" series, this text provides easily understood and implementable practices for improving client-developer relations.

Coming from a content/project management background in the e-learning industry, I found the authors' iterative methodology and willingness to include client input and feedback regularly and at all stages of the project, very refreshing.

Too often clients and developers take adversarial roles in the development of projects, each attempting to dominate the other in what should ideally be a productive partnership.

This text identifies the causes of this often dysfunctional relationship and offers practical solutions to prevent and correct these problems. The result is that both parties can focus their energies and attention on what is truly important, the successful completion of the project.

Even for those of us unfamiliar with the "Extreme Programming" series, this text provides easily understood and implementable practices for improving client-developer relations.

Coming from a content/project management background in the e-learning industry, I found the authors' iterative methodology and willingness to include client input and feedback regularly and at all stages of the project, very refreshing.

Too often clients and developers take adversarial roles in the development of projects, each attempting to dominate the other in what should ideally be a productive partnership.

This text identifies the causes of this often dysfunctional relationship and offers practical solutions to prevent and correct these problems. The result is that both parties can focus their energies and attention on what is truly important, the successful completion of the project.