too optimistic a view of XP

The book takes far too favourable a view of Extreme Programming [XP]. It ignores increasing results from industry about the brittleness of XP. You would benefit more by looking up "Extreme Programming Refactored: The Case Against XP" by Stephens and Rosenberg. It goes into gory details about actual XP attempts, including the famous initial one at Chrysler.

Which is not to say that Hunt's book is entirely wrong. Parts of it, like the need for unit testing, are not bad at all. It should be adopted in many projects. And the waterfall approach does have severe problems. But you can buy into agile programming without necessarily going to the extreme of XP.

Other Reviews

• Very limited look at Agile
• too optimistic a view of XP