eXtreme Software Development (XSoft)

The management of software cost, development effort and project planning are the key aspects of software development. Throughout the sixty-odd years of software development, the industry has gone at least four generations of programming languages and three major development paradigms. Still the total ability to move consistently from idea to product is yet to be achieved. In fact, recent studies document that the failure rate for software development has risen almost to 50 percent. There is no magic in managing software development successfully, but a number of issues related to software development make it unique. The basic problem of software development is risky. Some example of risk is error in estimation, schedule slips, project cancelled after numerous slips, high defect rate, system goes sour, business misunderstanding, false feature rich, staff turnover. XSoft addresses the risks mentioned above.. XSoft is a new methodology to manage software development successfully has been evolved and it is derived from Extreme Programming and COSMIC-Full Function Point and named as EXtreme Software Development (XSoft). XSoft covers the reasoning behind the XP process. Based on the experience gained on the original XP project, this paper describes what makes XSoft work, day to day and month to month from estimation to release. Successful software development is a team effort - not just the development team but the larger team consisting of customers, management and developers. XSoft is a simple process that brings these people together and helps them to succeed together. XSoft facilitates the needs of customers with the abilities of programmers and steering (managing the project to success). A complete case study gives the idea of developing software by XSoft methodology. A XSoft tool is developed to manage the XSoft projects.