The pomodoro technique for sustainable pace in extreme programming teams

Abstract

One of the common challenges of an Extreme Programming (XP) team is to find strategies so to reinforce practices and increase velocity. Most practices have found at least one optimal strategy tested and approved practically by the community, while 'sustainable pace' is core tenet missing a clear strategy. The aim of the Pomodoro Technique (PT) is exactly to fill this gap. The PT is a timeboxing strategy originally meant for optimizing personal work and study and then applied to XP. The PT is widely applied by Italian Agile teams, but is still little known elsewhere. This paper examines how the PT is applied by them and how it integrates with XP. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2008.