Hello, Kent. On Wednesday, March 26, 2008, at 3:21:09 PM, you
wrote:

> I appreciate you stating your needs and fears clearly. What I heard was:
> * You need to have people use the ideas in XP
> * You are afraid that if they knew their chances of benefiting, the
> wouldn't even try to use the ideas in XP

I appreciate your saying what you heard. Neither of those is just
exactly right, but close enough for discussion.

> I suspect that the actual percentage of people who invest in trying XP and
> who actually achieve noticeable improvement is much less than half. There
> are more than 100K copies of XP Explained out there (which I suppose is
> considerably less than 1% of programmers). That many people invested $30-$50
> (depending on where they bought it) plus whatever time they took reading it
> and trying things. I have yet to see the kind of changes I would expect if
> 50K programmers started working responsibly and accountably.

Yes. I was suggesting something different, if I understand you:
organizations that actually do try XP / Agile (far less than half, I
agree), are, in my totally subjective WAG, successful less than half
the time.

> There are some substantial changes ushered in by XP--continuous integration
> and, to a lesser extent, developer testing. However, these haven't created
> any kind of sea change in software development. I'm still shooting for the
> kind of change that Japanese manufacturing went through between 1960 and
> 1980, from a byword for cheap and shoddy good to an exemplar of quality and
> value.

That would be nice ...

> I'd like to examine the fear about people not even trying XP if they knew
> the risks. I think they already know the risks, programmers and executives
> alike. They've been through CASE, RUP, CMM, and any number of lesser "game
> changing" movements with their fundamental problems still intact. That they
> are willing to consider XP, Scrum, model-driven development, etc. shows that
> they haven't given up hope. However, they are (understandably) jaded.

OK ... but two questions:

1. Why the earlier impassioned plea to get numbers, in this
context?

2. If the numbers were unfavorable, as I believe they are,
wouldn't they hinder what we "want"?

> I've heard several expressions of frustrations on this list that Scrum is
> eating our lunch. If we want to make a comeback, and comeback it certainly
> would be at this point, I don't think we can play their game. They have
> stories about how all you have to do is deliver every month, how teams
> manage themselves, how two days of training make one a master. They aren't
> telling the whole story. If we try to convince people to use XP using the
> same tactic, not telling the whole story, people will ignore us. The Scrum
> partial story is much more attractive than the XP partial story we've been
> using to date.

I agree here, with the questions above ...

> Absolute openness about the costs, pains, risks, and rewards of XP is the
> right thing to do. It's a leadership position and it has a chance of
> working. I'm afraid that continuing to try to tell an attractive story will
> lead this community to become a cult of irrelevant technical competence. I
> would be satisfied to see a wiki full of stories about how people spent $N,
> got nothing for it, and here's what they would do differently. XP would be
> better for it. Then we could go to people with big checkbooks and say, "Big
> risk, big reward, here's what we've learned, here's how you manage it."
> Since there aren't big commercial players, crowdsourcing is the only way I
> can see to gather the information we need.

OK, well, that's interesting. I'd certainly like to have the info.
I'm not sure how it advances "the cause", but agree that openness
and truth are good and desirable. I like to know things like this
... even though I believe that the data will not work in favor of
XP, at least in the short term.

> Once again, I invite everyone here to record their organization's experience
> with XP, good or bad, at http://xpprojects.wikispaces.com. It's a chance for
> you to contribute to the community and reflect on your experience. Given the
> number of people on this list, we could, should we choose to, quickly have
> hundreds of stories from which to learn. This learning is a prerequisite to
> being able to say, twenty years from now, that software development is an
> exemplar of quality and value.

That would be most excellent.

Thanks,

Ron Jeffries
www.XProgramming.com
If we're not shipping our software when it's ready,
it's poor business practice.
If we're not sure whether our software is ready,
it's poor software practice.
http://www.xprogramming.com/blog/Page.aspx?display=FrequentReleases