I have decided to experiment a bit with the planning aspects of Extreme Programming. I will do this as a one man project, at least initially, so I can explore at my own pace, the mechanics of the planning game and those of the practices that I can manage to use on my own.

I am going to develop an instant messaging application. This is a fairly simple concept, but it is a real world application that I believe will present some challenges.

I will keep the iteration length really short, perhaps one or two days. This way I won’t get bored, and perhaps it is possible to turn this into a one or two day workshop if I can manage to compress the process even more.

I do think that using low-tech tools like a whiteboard and index cards is the best way to get a dynamic working environment in a co-located team. In this case though, I am going to use a tool, XPlanner, to help me with the planning for the following reasons:

• I am doing this from home and I think I will get one or two complaints about the mess if my better half sees a room full of sticky notes.

• Having kids around makes the risk of losing user stories sky rocket.

• At the company I work for, we are located across the world. So, co-located teams are at times not an option.

• I imagine extracting data from a tool like this makes it easier to publish how things are progressing on this blog.

I have just installed XPlanner. I am currently wearing my customer hat and am creating the first user stories, trying to really forget that somewhere deep down I am a developer.

More to come.