A software development methodology which is intended to improve software quality and responsiveness to changing customer requirements. It advocates frequent "releases" in short development cycles, which is intended to improve productivity and introduce checkpoints where new customer requirements can be added.
Pros: In traditional system development methods (such as SSADM or the waterfall model) the requirements for the system are determined at the beginning of the development project and often fixed from that point on. This means that the cost of changing the requirements at a later stage (a common feature of software engineering projects) will be high. Like other agile software development methods, Extreme Programming attempts to reduce the cost of change by having multiple short development cycles, rather than one long one.
Cons: Critics have noted several potential drawbacks, including problems with unstable requirements, no documented compromises of user conflicts, and lack of an overall design spec or document.
