The values described in Extreme Programming Explained are the foundation on which principles and practices are built. Last time we started to talk about those values through the lens of data science.

Today I’m going to describe some of the principles outlined by Beck and Anders, again asking whether they are applicable to data science, and whether data science could benefit from their application.

A new event in the Pivotal London office this week was our first lunchtime book club meeting. The first book suggested for discussion was Kent Beck and Cynthia Andres’ Extreme Programming (XP) Explained (2nd Edition).

This is a classic of the agile programming community and Kent Beck’s shorter first edition (1999) can lay claim to being one of the first books about agile programming practices. In this long post I’m going to start discussing the message of the book, and how I think some of the ideas apply in the world of data science. [Update: The next parts of this post about principles and practices are now up.]