XP is a light-weight methodology for small-to-medium-sized teams developing software in the face of vague or rapidly changing requirements. Extreme Programming Explained, page xiii, by Kent Beck, Addison Wesley, 2000
More detailed information about XP itself may be found by following the links at the bottom of this page.
One important part of XP is Release Planning (formally known as The Planning Game), which uses index cards to record stories (user requirements) and "tasks" (programmer assignments.) Using physical index cards has many advantages, but there are some disadvantages as well.
During Release Planning, the cards are sorted several different ways, by both the project customer and by the developers. If there are large numbers of cards, performing this sort manually can take considerable effort. XPCGI provides nicely-formatted reports with various sort-orders available, largely eliminating the need to manually sort index cards and making it simple to physically reorganize the cards in the desired order.
Another problem with hand-written index cards is that some managers simply don't like them, especially when you're practicing guerrilla-XP. If your handwriting is as bad as mine, this is even more of a problem. Many managers expect project documentation be presented to them in a formal, professional-looking document and simply dismiss a set of index cards without reading them. The really particular sort can be presented with the printed report instead of the cards, concealing the physical nature of the index cards altogether. The report itself can be embedded in a more formal wrapper to appease the picky manager.
Card loss is another concern. The janitorial services in my building are quite aggressive about picking up stray papers near the wastebaskets. Cards dropped nearby are likely to be irretrievably lost. Having cards in an online form allows them to be quickly reprinted if some disappear.
XPCGI is an attempt to address all of these issues. It provides a simple-to-use front-end to a perl/dbm database for entering story and task cards. It supports printing the resulting cards back to paper or index cards, as well as providing sorted reports and listings. This naturally eliminates the basic problem of chicken-scratch handwriting.
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