Hello All,

Ron sums up the situation very accurately. Let me add a little
background. The XP C3 project was the fourth attempt to replace the
legacy payroll system. At least two prior projects were defeated by
political/nontechnical forces.

A project to implement a package solution had been previously killed
by a manager who had been involved in the creation of the legacy
system. Among other things, he had imposed the requirement that the
package be adapted to only accept unit-record input and not allow any
direct input from the user interface.

This fellow rotated back to run payroll and subsequently helped
terminate C3. The Peoplesoft effort only began in earnest after his
retirement.

My understanding is that the Peoplesoft payroll effort will complete
its roll out to the salaried population this month. Or, approximately
seven years after the C3 team was poised to do so.



Friday, June 22, 2007, 7:51:09 AM, you wrote:

> 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



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