Exploring extreme programming in context: an industrial case study

A longitudinal case study evaluating the effects of adopting the Extreme Programming (XP) methodology was performed at Sabre Airline Solutions™. The Sabre team was a characteristically agile team in that they had no need to scale or re-scope XP for their project parame-ters and organizational environment. The case study compares two releases of the same product. One release was completed just prior to the team’s adoption of the XP methodology, and the other was completed after ap-proximately two years of XP use. Comparisons of the new release project results to the old release project re-sults show a 50 % increase in productivity, a 65 % im-provement in pre-release quality, and a 35 % improve-ment in post-release quality. These findings suggest that, over time, adopting the XP process can result in in-creased productivity and quality