Introducing XP—XP Practice 9: The Planning Game

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

XP Practice 9: The Planning Game

The planning game, which is a part of release planning, usually takes a day or two to complete. The idea of this practice is to get to the big picture—what the customer wants and how much it’s going to cost—as fast as possible. This way, the customers can decide if they want to proceed with the project. If they choose not to, then they have invested only a week, as opposed to the months they might invest using a traditional approach.

Customers often want everything under the sun, unaware of the cost of their requests. They don’t usually have realistic expectations as to the level of effort needed when building software. They just define what it is they want and the date they expect it to be delivered.

With waterfall type methodologies, this all happens during the analysis and requirements phases and usually takes months to complete. This phase is long because the customers who are requesting the features are not involved during the development phase. Therefore, all of the customers’ thoughts and ideas must be captured in written documents. Unfortunately, this also requires the customers to know everything they need and want from the onset of the project. It also requires that nothing change between the time the requirements are defined and when the system is delivered.

In addition, the requirements in a waterfall project often form the contract between the customer and the development organization. This is how the development team knows that the team has completed what the customer requested. The contract is used to discourage change, because changes usually result in renegotiation.

XP gathers these requirements, in just a few days to a couple of weeks (depending on the complexity of the project), during release planning. Everyone is present during this time (developers, testers, and customers), so the need for written documentation decreases. Costing of the requested features is done immediately and on a feature-by-feature basis.