Conclusion

Most of XP consists of good practices that should be thoughtfully considered for any environment. Although the merits of any of these practices can be debated in comparison with other ways of dealing with the same issues, none of them should be arbitrarily rejected.

Putting these practices together as a methodology may be a paradigm shift in the same sense that concurrent engineering is. The concepts in concurrent engineering have been around for decades; integrating those concepts as a system results in a paradigm shift in how to build products. In a similar manner, XP provides a systems perspective on programming (if not the only one), just as the Software CMM provides a systems perspective on organizational process improvement. Organizations that want to improve their capability should take advantage of the good ideas in both and exercise common sense in selecting and implementing those ideas.