Frank Maurer

XP/Agile Universe 2003 (2003 : New Orleans, La.)

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the XP / Agile Universe 2003 Conference held in New Orleans, LA, USA in August 2003. The 17 revised full papers presented together with abstracts or papers from an educator symposium and workshop summaries were carefully reviewed and selected from 35 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on becoming agile, agile methods and processes, agile testing, and tool support for agile teams.

Third XP and Second Agile Universe Conference, New Orleans, LA, USA, August 10-13, 2003, Proceedings

Extreme Programming and Agile Methods - XP/Agile Universe 2003

Don Wells

XPAgileUniverse2003isthethirdconferenceinaseriesrunninginNorthA- rica and attracting participants from all over the world who are interested in the research, development and application of agile software processes. Agile app- aches value people and interaction over processes and tools – moving software engineering from the process-oriented software development approaches of the 1990s towards people-oriented approaches that we are starting to see more and more in this decade. Agile approaches stress a holistic view of software deve- pers as being involved in analysis, design, implementation and testing activities, while more traditional, tayloristic approaches separate these tasks and assign them to di?erent “resources. ” Tayloristic approaches create knowledge-sharing problems as information gathered by one person needs to be handed over – usually in the form of documentation – to the next person in the chain. Agile approaches reduce the number of hand-o?s and, thus, decrease the amount of required documentation for knowledge sharing. While deemed a novelty only a few years ago, agile methods are now be- ming established in the software industry and are being applied in more and more application domains. While agile approaches move into the mainstream of software organizations, we are only now beginning to understand their bene?ts, areas of applicability, and also their dangers. This year’s conference will increase this understanding and provide a better base for industry practitioners as they assess the e?ectiveness of agile methods in their environment.

Pekka Abrahamsson

Michele Marchesi

The field of software engineering is characterized by speed and turbulence in many regards. While new ideas are proposed almost on a yearly basis, very few of them live for a decade or a longer. Lightweight software development methods were a new idea in the latter part of the 1990s. Now, ten years later, they are better known as agile software development methods, and an active community driven by practitioners has formed around the new way of thinking. Agile software development is currently being embraced by the research community as well. As a sign of increased research activity, most research-oriented conferences have an agile software development track included in the conference program. The XP conference series established in 2000 was the first conference dedicated to agile processes in software engineering. The idea of the conference is to offer a unique setting for advancing the state of the art in research and practice of agile processes. This year’s conference was the tenth consecutive edition of this international event. Due to the diverse nature of different activities during the conference, XP is claimed to be more of an experience rather then a regular conference. It offers several different ways to interact and strives to create a truly collaborative environment where new ideas and exciting findings can be presented and shared. This is clearly visible from this year’s program as well.

Frank Maurer

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