Planning game

Extreme programming (XP) is an agile software development methodology used to implement software projects. This article details the practices used in this methodology. Extreme programming has 12 practices, grouped into four areas, derived from the best practices of software engineering.

Pair programming means that all code is produced by two people programming on one task on one workstation. One programmer has control over the workstation and is thinking mostly about the coding in detail. The other programmer is more focused on the big picture, and is continually reviewing the code that is being produced by the first programmer. Programmers trade roles after minute to hour periods.

The pairs are not fixed; programmers switch partners frequently, so that everyone knows what everyone is doing, and everybody remains familiar with the whole system, even the parts outside their skill set. This way, pair programming also can enhance team-wide communication. (This also goes hand-in-hand with the concept of Collective Ownership).

The main planning process within extreme programming is called the Planning Game. The game is a meeting that occurs once per iteration, typically once a week. The planning process is divided into two parts:

The purpose of the Planning Game is to guide the product into delivery. Instead of predicting the exact dates of when deliverables will be needed and produced, which is difficult to do, it aims to "steer the project" into delivery using a straightforward approach. The Planning Game approach has also been adopted by non-software projects and teams in the context of business agility.

This is an iterative process of gathering requirements and estimating the work impact of each of those requirements.

When business cannot come up with any more requirements, one proceeds to the commitment phase.

This phase involves the determination of costs, benefits, and schedule impact. It has four components:

The business side sorts the user stories by business value. They will arrange them into three piles:

The developers sort the user stories by risk. They also categorize into three piles: low, medium and high risk user stories. The following is an example of an approach to this:

All indexes for a user story are added, assigning the user stories a risk index of low (0–1), medium (2–4), or high (5–6).

...
Wikipedia