Does XP deliver quality and maintainable code?

Abstract

Extreme Programming aims at delivering working software for less money and still of high quality. It is well known that software maintainability is one of the most important concerns and cost factors of the software industry. The question of this research is whether Extreme Programming intrinsically delivers easily maintainable code or not. We propose a model on how to evaluate the evolution of source code quality and in particular maintainability in an Extreme Programming environment and evaluate it with a small case study. The results obtained from the case study seem to sustain the hypothesis that Extreme Programming enhances quality and in particular maintainability of a software product. Given such promising results, additional experimentation is required to validate and generalize the results of this work. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.