Introducing XP—XP Practice 14: Journaling

Microsoft .NET Framework, ASP.NET, Visual C# (CSharp, C Sharp, C-Sharp) Developer Training, Visual Studio

XP Practice 14: Journaling

Journaling is a practice that we suggest adding to your XP toolkit. It is the other practice that we added to the standard 12.

Every day, you should spend about 15 minutes or so writing down what happened that day. This can be your thoughts, observations, or just general notes as to the day’s progress. The idea is to write about whatever is on your mind that day.

Journaling can be an effective tool for finding positive and negative patterns within the XP team. You can use this information as a lessons-learned type tool. Also, journaling can be a way to collect your thoughts so you can communicate more effectively. You might even find it humorous when you review your journal after the project is over.

By now, you should start to see that the practices are very interdependent. Figure 1-1 shows that interdependency. Removing one or more practices will have a negative impact on the remaining practices. For example, if you choose not to practice test-first development, you will impact collective code ownership because the developers will not have the confidence that the tests would have given them when they change code.

Figure 1-1. The XP practices are interdependent.

The bottom line is that all of these XP practices are good. These are practices that all developers start out wanting to exercise, but because of project deadlines and unforeseen circumstances, they are dropped in favor of completing promised system functionality.

XP believes that these practices are too valuable to let slide, regardless of the promised functionality.