XP gives them the freedom to change their mind at will, and they do??”too much. They slip into agile
thrashing, which means they overreact to every opportunity, changing direction every time something new
comes up. As a result, the team never finishes anything valuable and has trouble showing progress.
To help prevent this problem, I??™ve added the Vision practice and gone into more detail about appropriate
release planning. I??™ve also added the Risk Management practice to help teams understand how to make reliable
long-term commitments.
I??™ve also noticed that teams struggle with XP??™s automated acceptance tests. Although they are intended to ???allow
the customer to know when the system works and tell the programmers what needs to be done??? [Jeffries et
al.], I??™ve found that they??™re often too limited to truly fulfill this role. In fact, some customers worry that, by
defining acceptance tests, they??™ll be stuck with software that passes the letter of the tests but fails to fulfill the
spirit of their expectations. Worse, most teams implement these tests as system-level tests that take a lot of
work to create and maintain. They run slowly and lead to build and integration problems.
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