Recognizing and responding to "bad smells" in extreme programming

The agile software development process called Extreme Programming (XP) is a set of best practices which, when used, promises swifter delivery of quality software than one finds with more traditional methodologies. In this paper, we describe a large software development project that used a modified XP approach, identifying several unproductive practices that we detected over its two-year life that threatened the swifter project completion we had grown to expect. We have identified areas of trouble in the entire life cycle, including analysis, design, development, and testing. For each practice we identify, we discuss the solution we implemented to correct it and, more importantly, examine the early symptoms of those poor practices ("bad smells") that project managers, analysts, and developers need to look out for in order to keep an XP project on its swifter track.