In 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were the first humans who set foot on the moon as part of the Apollo 11 mission. This was the culmination of a race to the moon that spanned more than a decade, which went hand in hand with tremendous technological advances. After the Apollo 11 mission, there were six more crewed landings on the moon between 1969 and 1972. Let’s fast forward to today. How many crewed landings happened on the moon during the last 10 years? Not a single one! One of the reasons that there are no more moon landings happening today, is that we simply don’t know how to do it anymore. Basically, we’ve lost the knowledge to go to the moon!

In the early 2000’s, the Extreme Programming (XP) methodology introduced a bunch of core practices that are fundamental to building high-quality software. Many software teams have learned and adopted these practices and made them their own. During these past two decades, many of the XP practices have evolved and will continue to evolve in the future. On the flip side, there’s a growing amount of software teams that have adopted watered down versions of XP’s core practices, to the point that they have lost their meaning and usefulness. This is quite unfortunate, as these teams are missing out tremendously in delivering value to their stakeholders. As the adoption of these watered down practices continues to spread, the software industry is losing a lot of the learnings that Extreme Programming has gifted us. Just as what happened to the moon landings, if we don’t study, learn and adopt the original core practices of Extreme Programming, we will lose this valuable knowledge.

In this talk, you will learn about the origins of Extreme Programming, how it came to be and which problems it solves. We’ll go over each of its core practices, discuss the value that they bring and where to take them from there. Gaining a deep understanding of XP will pay dividends for every software developer’s career. This talk will get you started on this journey.