But anyway, when I last asked Kent what XP is, he said
 "XP is a community of software development practices based on
 values of simplicity, communication, feedback, and courage".
 That was about two or three years ago.

 I look forward to seeing the second edition as well.
 I'm sure it will be enlightening ...

 "Without test-first and refactoring, clients think
 they must assemble as many program requirements as
 they can afford to have written. This effort snarls
 all relative business priorities together, making
 Scope Control impossible. It obscures opportunities
 for simplification. Designing and implementing many
 features all at once is very hard, leading to our
 industry's reputation for very large failures. Putting
 tests in front of development's inner cycle permits an
 outer cycle of incremental feature growth. That
 relieves the Customer of the responsibility to predict
 the future and guess which complete set of features
 will maximize productivity."

.. Juergens answer:

 Nice description.
 Sometimes I try to explain that to non technical people
 with the following picture:

 If you have only one chance to get your wishes on a
 list, it is like Christmas for a child. You make sure
 you get every little wish on that list and hope for the best.

 If you are sure that you can get your wishes on the list
 at any time. You will just put the most important ones
 there which come to your mind easily.

Sabre Airline Solutions had many years of experience with its AirFlite Profit Manager, a big modeling and forecasting package that many airlines use to wring more income out of flight schedules. Even so, Release 8 of the software was four months late in 2000 after final system testing turned up 300 bugs. The first customer found 26 more bugs in the first three days of its acceptance testing, and subsequent joint testing by Sabre and the customer uncovered an additional 200 defects. www.computerworld.com/softwaretopics/software/story/0,10801,91646,00.html

About the $200M Oracle-Ford Desaster: the management did not give them enough power to go fully agile

Chet Hendrickson:

 It was a very frustrating situation.  The team asked Don and me
 to help with preventing the Oracle consutants from making changes
 directly to the production system.  This was about $150 million into the project.

 We tried to sell them on a more agile approach (as you might imagine), but by
 this time they were pretty far gone.

 It was unfortunante that we were not operating at a level in the organization
 that would have allowed us to get the plug pulled sooner.

 chet

Georg Tuparev has a nice case story, too: speak out if you are put on a death march.

 Few years ago I was called to lead a huge team stuck in one and half
 year design phase. The team was supposed to build a control software
 for a network of telecom satellites. Cannot disclosed names and
 resources, but one could imagine ...

 Three days in the project I had a phone conference with the CxO's of
 both companies involved. Told them that the way it is going no
 satellite will ever fly and that I know a better way. After getting
 green line, the design document was burned with a small celebration at
 a BBQ, and 85% of the initial team members were sent to an indefinitely
 long vacation. With the rest (15%) of the team we had the first
 functioning version 2 months ahead of the schedule and 50% lower then
 expected expenses.

 So the lessons:
 - it is never late to change direction of a project in order to save it.
 - I do not agree with Kent that this is a sad story. If you are a good
 programmer put on a death march project you should speak out! If no one
 listens - walk away. There is just one very precious life in front of
 us - do not waste it! And if these folks wasted 2 years of their lives,
 well, it is their business ... but they should not expect my
 sympathies.

 BTW, Philip is right - the project I was telling about had a 9 months x
 40 people "Big Requirements Up Front"!!! Then the design started...

 Just my 0.02

 Georg Tuparev

Then I sit here for 3 hours trying to understand why the dammed computer does not do what it should. It’s that feeling I hate most. You waste time .. I mean I could as well go skiing or drink a bottle of vodka .. would be about the same productivity progress on my code and at least I would enjoy the sun.

After hitting my head long enough and starting to isolate the stuff .. I found it .. I had forgotten one return in a most trivial three line long method. Shame on me. Now I will go back to being test-infected. test-first is even better. Dammit .. sorry for the rant, but I doubt there are many systems like computers where one comma at the wrong place can make everything go boom. Oh well, try to modify the DNA and do not know what you are doing. :-).

The Cook’s Tour offers an excellent howto to get yourself and your customers into the test-writing mode.

An intro article by Bill Wake.

 I assume this popped up on everyone else's RSS aggregator as well, but...
  From Darrell Norton's blog [1] and Artima developer forum [2]: the
  current issue of CIO magazine is all about agility:
  http://www.cio.com/archive/081504/index.html

For developers, XP allows you to focus on coding and avoid needless paperwork and meetings. It provides a more social atmosphere, more opportunities to learn new skills, and a chance to go home at a decent hour each night. It gives you very frequent feelings of achievement, and generally allows you to produce code that you feel good about.

For the Customer, XP creates working software faster, and that software tends to have very few defects. It allows you to change your mind whenever you need to, with minimal cost and almost no complaining from the developers. It produces reliable estimates so you can coordinate your schedule easier.

For management, XP delivers working software for less money, and the software is more likely to do what the end users actually want. It cuts risk in a couple ways: 1) It allows you to "pull the plug" on development at almost any time, and still have highly valuable code, and probably even a valuable working (if incomplete) application. 2) It reduces your dependence on individual superstars, and at the same time can improve employee satisfaction and retention.

The biggest disadvantage: It’s hard. It’s difficult to get many developers to accept the practices, and it takes a lot of discipline to keep doing them all. Customers may not like the idea of having to be so involved. Management may expect fixed-cost, fixed-scope estimates, which XP teams often refuse to create (because they are usually incorrect with any methodology).

Also, certain people may feel their jobs are being threatened, particularly architects, testers, and project managers. "Cowboy" coding "superstars" may dislike the reduction in fame, attention, and adreneline from "saving" the project at the last minute.

 >Because it is important for the customer to have an idea of how much
 >> everything will cost ...

 In 99% of the times customer neither needs nor wants "everything"! One
 of the big dangers of BRUF is that it imposes the wrong feeling that
 "everything" is important. This is a major distraction that inevitably
 leads to scope-creep and eventually project failures. When we have the
 first meeting with a new customer we ask the following 3 questions:
 1. What is your biggest pain?
 2. If we solve this and only this pain, will your life get better?
 3. Are you willing to pay X amount of Euros to us to solve this pain.

 If any of these questions is answered with "no" we just thank for the
 coffee and walk away. If all 3 questions are answered with yes, we move
 to the first planning game...

 Put it in another way: I do believe it is extremely dishonest and
 incorrect behavior to conduct 9 months BRUF only to reach the
 conclusion that the customer does not have enough resources to
 continue. It is dishonest because as I wrote in an earlier posting,
 _all_ good developers I know are able to estimate almost immediately
 the scale of any software project without conducting BRUF.

As part of my interview, I was required to sit and pair program for about half an hour. We worked on an writing a unit test for an actual defect that currently existed on the project (although it could easily have been a real user story, or a contrived scenario if the project had not yet started).

I thought this was a great idea, and a great source of knowledge for both sides. I was able to show that I did indeed know how to program, write unit tests, knew my way around an IDE, had acceptable interpersonal communication skills, etc. I was also able to get a different perspective on what the team dynamics were like, which I could not have gotten from a formal interview setting.

The interesting thing is that both me and my partner (one of the interviewers) taught each other about some tools and approaches that we were not previously aware of.

Even though I didn’t get the job (the position was withdrawn), I kept in touch and became friends with the interviewer/partner, and the things we taught each other came in useful in our future development work.

This company also asked for code samples and a mini-presentation, which I also thought was a great idea for separating the wheat from the chaff.

Since I have had responsibility for helping interview, select and recommend job candidates in the past, I know for a fact that the best resume and interview performance in the world is inconclusive. You can still get a lemon, even though the lemon may be very good at piling on the BS.

From my perspective as a job candidate, I am confident in my skills and my abilities. I know that I can quickly adapt and excel in any position within my skill set. However, its very frustrating when I cannot convince the potential employer of this through only a traditional resume and interview.

In future interviews that I go for (which will hopefully only be with XP/Agile shops), I am going to suggest this as a way for the hiring company to get a better idea of my skills, knowledge and abilities, both technical and interpersonal. If I am ever part of a hiring team in the future, I will definitely propose that code samples and a pair-programming session be part of the interview process for candidates who make it to the final stages. This is admittedly very time-consuming, but probably much less net investment than being forced to live with (or try to get rid of) an employee who looked much better "on paper".

Thanks, Chad

I’ve been thinking about the problems of applying XP to whole organizations. Turns out this is ground thoroughly covered by the lean production folks.

Here is a paper I found helpful: www.nwlean.net/no_harm.zip The premise is that every step of the transformation must pay for itself.

Getting people to understand that their problems are tractable can be hard, I’ve found. Rob Mee was talking to a guy about TDD on a gig of ours recently. "Sure, yeah, TDD is a great idea." "Why don’t you do it?" "It’ll make us go slower." "But it makes you go faster." "Yes, of course, but it’ll make us go slower." "But it’ll make you go faster" *iterate N times for annoying large N* "Okay, it makes people go faster everywhere but here."

Amongst other things this article tells you when best to have children :-). groups.yahoo.com/group/extremeprogramming/files/when%20should%20we%20test.pdf

• Eliminate waste: Spend time only on what adds real customer value
• Amplify learning: When you have tough problems, increase feedback
• Decide as late as possible: Keep your options open as long as practical, but no longer
• Deliver as fast as possible: Deliver value to customers as soon as they ask for it
• Empower the team: Let the people who add value use their full potential.
• Build integrity in: Don’t try to tack on integrity after the fact - build it in
• See the whole: Beware of the temptation to optimize parts at the expense of the whole

Link

 >Reciprocity is not guaranteed on airlines (or toll bridges - it
 >has always amused me that the toll on the Severn Bridge between
 >England and Wales is GBP 4.20 for a car to enter Wales but there
 >is no toll the other way, ie entering England). (Maybe it shows
 >how the two countries value themselves?)

All of the bridges in the San Francisco Bay area only charge toll in one direction. Some genius realized that, on the average, just about as many cars went each way for the obvious reason that most trips across the bridges are round trips. So they doubled the toll and took down the toll booths going one way (except for the Golden Gate Bridge where the toll booths remain, unattended). There has been considerable saving in toll collection costs and the toll booth traffic jams in one direction are gone. Is it possible the Severn Bridge does similarly?

Basically it’s an ad for Whiteboard Photo. ;-)

Phlip:

 During the planning game, you review last week's
 finished stories, and they inspire you to write some
 new cards, to edit some cards, and to toss some cards.
 Then you (the Onsite Customer) re-sort all the cards,
 and draw off the top batch for the next week.

 But another input into this system that affects the
 planning game - the competition.

 The USA occupied Iraq using an effective new battle
 technique. In traditional advances, you send a
 diversionary force against one of your enemies flanks,
 draw them that way, then send your main force against
 their other flank.

 Modern soldiers, with cell-phones and such, follow a
 more agile approach. You simply send two forks of your
 forces, probing towards both flanks. You use sensitive
 algorithms to detect the defending commander's
 decision which flank to defend. If you can rapidly
 turn one advance into the diversion, and the other
 into the main attack, you will soon collapse the
 opposition's ability to effectively make decisions.

 Agile onsite customers can play this card too. If you
 detect your competition's marching orders, in
 real-time (using either sensitive algorithms,
 good-old-fashioned industrial espionage, or just
 reading their self-congratulatory Web site), you can
 then request iteration features which provide the
 minimum amount of code needed to start your project
 towards blocking the competition's advance. This
 technique will, again, collapse the competition's
 ability to make decisions.

 Or convince them to hire an XP coach or three. So
 either way it's a win-win-win for us! ;-)

Steven’s reply: :-)

 Or you could follow the agile strategy that Microsoft
 pioneered - announcing products with your competitions'
 features before you even start implementing them.