Hello, Ravi. On Friday, June 22, 2007, at 3:43:09 AM, you wrote:

> Hmm the clients were unhappy. The code was shut down after meeting a
> fourth(?) of the target requirements and the team disbanded and the
> client so disgusted with the result that the joke in the client
> organization was "We used XP Once and Only Once (ha ha )" (all gleaned
> from the C2 discussion and other internet sources) . This is NOT
> failure? Sorry sounds like a disaster to me.

This is inaccurate. The quote you provided was made by a Daimler
employee from Germany who was giving a "funny" talk at an XP 200n
session. He had never had anything to do with the project.

From the beginning of the project to the end, the C3 project
delivered exactly what they said they could, iteration in and
iteration out. The code worked with higher accuracy than the
existing program and was deployed against one large target
population and one or two smaller ones.

At the time the project was terminated, the system was correctly
calculating the payroll for the next target population, and
performance was good enough but only barely. Things had certainly
taken longer than people wanted ... but also exactly as long as the
team's velocity and Release Plans predicted.

At the time of project termination, all of the projects original
sponsors had moved on. There was no one involved other than the
technical team, including the XP customer, who had been part of the
original thinking or sponsorship.

The termination of the project brought no approbation of any kind on
any member of either the technical side nor the business side of the
project. It was an economic decision made primarily because the
project had been internally funded, and IT was under pressure to
find "synergy savings".

It is interesting to note that since then, DC has spent many
millions of dollars trying to adapt PeopleSoft payroll to do the
things that C3 already did.

So, was the project a success, or a failure? It is hard to say.
Certainly it didn't last as long or deploy as widely as one would
have liked. On the other hand, it delivered working software on an
incredibly predictable basis. A business decision was made to
terminate it, for business reasons.

C3 showed, for those who care to pay attention, that the XP
practices can work, and produce highly reliable software on a very
predictable schedule. XP is not the only way to do that. It is,
however, the best way I have seen in nearly a half century of doing
software.

There is little or no science around software methods. I'd think few
would say otherwise. To imagine that all that is not hard science is
"religion" is fatuous.

To call what that team did and observed "religion", in that tone of
voice, is highly insulting to the individuals involved and to the
individuals who work hard to give people everywhere the chance to
learn what has been done on C3, and elsewhere. I object strongly.

Ron Jeffries
www.XProgramming.com
If not now, when? -- The Talmud