XP Values: Communication

September 17, 2007 by Artem Marchenko

Extreme Programming values are the primary guidelines to be used whenever it is not clear how to resolve the particular situation. Value of communication is to explicitly state that XP teams consider sharing the status of pretty much everything being important. Even though the useless meetings are not too welcome in any methodology, in general XP teams prefer the risk of over-communicating to under-communicating.

XP teams share information often and on many levels. They use pair programming for quick knowledge transfer, collaborative workspaces with big information radiators so that everybody could see and feel the current status by just entering a room, they use daily short standup meetings for updating the whole team on the current and perceived problems, they typically have a lot of automated tests and continuous integration server to instantly share the code integrity information. Eventually XP teams strive for having the customer on site so that the team could continuously demonstrate the current software to the customer and get his feedback for figuring out what the exact requirements and priorities

What is of biggest importance is that XP teams strive for incremental tuning of their communication practices. Via a mechanism of retrospectives they can drop the sharing practices that don't work for them, decide to try something new or amend the practice not working so well for them.

Primary XP practices directly supporting the value of communication

• Sit together - and therefore talk more
• Informative workplace - make the environment share the information
• Pair programming - efficient one to one knowledge transfer
• Stories - user stories unlike the classic requirements are the promise for conversation, for talking to the customer on what he actually needs
• Ten-minute build and Continuous integration - know about the code integrity status latest in 10 minutes after the code changes

Corollary XP practices directly supporting the value of communication

• Real customer involvement - for communicating what's done and his opinion on it and on what should be done next
• Team continuity - keep the people working well together across the course of the projects
• Daily deployment - realize the final product status early and often

This page is a part of the Extreme Programming overview

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