Documentation

Getting started

1. Download the plug-ins using the Eclipse update site.
2. Select a project in the Navigator.
3. Select Add/Remove Agile Planning project nature from the XP Studio menu.

Agile Planning perspective

XP Studio defines a perspective to facilitate working with eXtreme Programming Markup Language (XPML) documents. You can open this using Window|Open Perspective|Other... and selecting Agile Planning.

Creating XPML documents

The next step is to start creating XPML documents. XP Studio provides a number of wizards to help you with creating releases, iterations, user stories, and use cases. You access these using File|New if you've opened the Agile Planning perspective. If you're in another perspective, e.g. Java, then select File|New|Other..., and select the required wizard from the Agile Planning category.

You currently edit the XPML documents in an XML editor. Support for more advanced editing is planned for a future version of XP Studio.

Using the Development Plan

The Development Plan view shows the planning. It displays a hierarchy with all the projects in the workspace with the AgilePlanning nature as the top level. Below that are the projects' releases and unscheduled user stories. Under each release are the Unified Process phases: Inception, Elaboration, Construction, and Transition. Each phase contains iterations, which contain scheduled user stories.

Double clicking on an XPML document opens the associated editor for that document.

The Development Plan is read-only in the current version of XP Studio. Later versions will add the ability to schedule user stories using drag & drop.

XPML problems

XPML documents link to each other in several ways. Since there is no dedicated editor support to manage those relationships yet, it's not too hard to create invalid links. Fortunately, XP Studio's incremental project builder reports these as problem markers, which you can view in the Problems view. These can also be non-link related problems, like a user story that is scheduled in an iteration, but has no business value assigned.

Tracking progress

Once you have completed a couple of iterations, you'd probably want to know whether you'll make the target date for your release. A useful trick in the Agile bag for this is the Risk-Adjusted Burn-Up Chart that is available as a view: