Extreme programming in software engineering education: an experiment

Abstract

The recently success of Extreme Programming (XP) methodology within the software industry has exercised a growing pressure and demand on educational institutions to introduce XP practices in software engineering courses. This paper reports details of how we conducted an experiment to apply XP in a software engineering course project in the department of Computer Science at the College of Computer and Information Sciences, king Saud University. The experiment was conducted during fall 2004 semester on four groups of senior pair-students who were asked to develop a simple Automatic Teller Machine “ATM” system. The project lasted eleven weeks and included three releases. Results and feed back from students are reported and recommendations are highlighted. Results show that XP teams were able to deliver complete system functionality in due time and, in addition, they were able to respond to requirement changes imposed at the last release.