Success stories using XP

[Sunny Raj]

Are there any success stories or comparison of XP and regular prog. in a real life situation?

[John Mathew]

I think there are many companies adopting XP, as for us we have not yet. We have a spiral model in place.
My friend who works for mortgage company developing application in J2EE has found it very interesting and effective.

[Lasse Koskela]

Originally posted by Sunny Raj:
Are there any success stories or comparison of XP and regular prog. in a real life situation?

You can't really compare Extreme Programming with "regular programming" because Extreme Programming is programming. It's just a good kind of programming.
Obviously, XP has certain benefits and, as with almost all processes, the most central being improved quality of the resulting software.
[ May 14, 2003: Message edited by: Lasse Koskela ]

[Mark Herschberg]

Well it would be interesting to see a study of what percentage of projects using XP fail, and comparing that with non-XP rates.
--Mark

[Junilu Lacar]

Originally posted by Mark Herschberg:
Well it would be interesting to see a study of what percentage of projects using XP fail, and comparing that with non-XP rates.
--Mark

Not really sure what the point of such a study would be. I don't think a comparison of failure rates will really help us learn anything. Wouldn't that be like a study of what percentage of trips by air are completed and comparing that with non-air trips? Things happen and projects will fail for various reasons.
The only way I can see such a study would be useful is if it compared how much the practices used in XP projects help to avoid or control the causes of failure vs. practices used in non-XP projects.

[Ilja Preuss]

http://developer.hpmiddleware.com/webservicesnews/xp_programming.html
http://www.objectmentor.com/processImprovement/xpCaseStudies

[Mark Herschberg]

Originally posted by Junilu Lacar:

Not really sure what the point of such a study would be. I don't think a comparison of failure rates will really help us learn anything. Wouldn't that be like a study of what percentage of trips by air are completed and comparing that with non-air trips? Things happen and projects will fail for various reasons.

To borrow Lasse's logic: non-air trips are trips!
Well, there is no (non-anecdotal) evidence that XP produces better results, just people claiming that "well because we do A, B, and C, it works better." Now in fairness, there's no evidence that alternative methods are better, either. A number of studies have yielded project failure rates. Most studies with which I'm familiar predate XP.
You are right that ideally you would want to isolate variables (e.g. 50 similar projects, with similar processes, except one uses pair programming and the other does not). The reality is, you pretty much can only make general classifications on project size and process type.
--Mark