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General XP’s phases are exploration, commitment and steering. At the release level, these align with particular collections of activities, called workflow details in the RUP Project Management discipline.
Exploration and Commitment phases could be mapped into the Plan for Next Iteration and Steering could be mapped into Monitor and Control Project phase.

In Extreme Programming by Kent Beck, there is a lifecycle of an ideal XP project, and the first level headings are exploration, planning, iterations to first release, ‘productionizing’, maintenance and death . These appear to be the top-level phases, but it turns out this is not quite accurate. An XP project will be bounded by an initial exploratory phase and “death” when the project is closed out. But the major beat is the release and each release has an exploration phase . So the exploration phase that brackets the project (and leads into the first release) is a special case in that there is an initial gate to pass at which a decision is made on the wisdom of continuing at all. Both XP releases and iterations have the three phases exploration, commitment, and steering. “Maintenance” really characterizes the nature of the XP project after the first release.
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