To XP or Not?

I just posted this to the Xtreme Programming Yahoo group, and thought it was worth sharing. I start out quoting David Winslow …

I want this project to succeed and I want to do the right thing. With that in mind I am punting for us to develop an agile xp approach to the project. However I am meeting a lot of resistance from the stakeholders as they don’t understand the XP process.

My suggestion is this:

Don’t call it XP

Don’t call it Scrum

Instead, call it “delivering small pieces of finished work on very tight timeframes”, or, if you must “lean software development” (or Toyota.)

Pair Programming, Test Driven Development, and refactoring are just plain good engineering practices. You don’t need to ask permission to do them.

—–> I once worked on the “after project” where the “before project” took three years, technically worked, but didn’t meet the customers needs.

At the first “requirements elicitation” meeting, I pulled out index cards and started taking notes. Some people felt uncomfortable, and I replied “After I finish these cards you will review them and sort them – and I will DELIVER the first card on the stack, COMPLETED, in a month – possibly with more.”

All of a sudden, the room got very quiet. Then the customer/manager replied “ok then. Let me see those cards.”

The rest, as they say, is history …