Pekka Abrahamsson & Richard Baskerville 
Agile Processes in Software Engineering and Extreme Programming 
9th International Conference, XP 2008, Limerick, Ireland, June 10-14, 2008, Proceedings

The XP conference series established in 2000 was the first conference dedicated to agile processes in software engineering. The idea of the conference is to offer a unique setting for advancing the state of the art in the research and practice of agile processes. This year’s conference was the ninth consecutive edition of this international event. The conference has grown to be the largest conference on agile software development outside North America. The XP conference enjoys being one of those conferences that truly brings practitioners and academics together. About 70% of XP participants come from industry and the number of academics has grown steadily over the years. XP is more of an experience rather than a regular conference. It offers several different ways to interact and strives to create a truly collaborative environment where new ideas and exciting findings can be presented and shared. For example, this year’s open space session, which was "a conference within a conference", was larger than ever before. Agile software development is a unique phenomenon from several perspectives.