Versioning And XP

This came across the AgileDotNet mailing list awhile back and indicates one of the misconceptions about XP that I run across regularly.

Does anyone have experience of developing web services using agile
methodologies?
I'm in a team who're about to start developing a suite of web services using
XP, and I'm concerned about using an iterative approach to web services.
I'd be grateful if anyone could pass on any information regarding such a
situation - especially any ideas (and documents) regarding versioning.

Here is my reply.

Do you have concerns other than versioning?

 

I assume your versioning concerns revolve around the (wsdl) contract changing each iteration. Realize that even though the goal of XP is to have working software that could be deployed in production you don't have to. That is the point of release planning. There are multiple iterations that make up a release and during those iterations the public interface may change as you discover things about what you're really building.

 

Once you have released your webservice (or any other type of application with a public interface) you need to have a versioning strategy in place irregardless of the software development process used to build the product. It is possible that XP would allow you to release versions faster than some other methodology, but you need to work with other parts of your company (i.e. the customer) to determine when a version should be released.