The Nature Of XTC

This page aims to spark some debate about what Xtc is about.

• Working in XP can be hard so its good to meet other people and discuss common problems. It's a professional network and support group.
• It's not just XP
• XTC encourages people to write papers, books, articles and run events to publicize XP.
• XTC allows people to gain experience in XP practices when their day-job doesn't. 
• XTC introduces people to the XP community. FamilyTree is a list of well-known people in the field.
• XTC is a social club for like minded people to have a drink after work and put the world to rights!
• XTC has an anarchic spirit

As a founder of the club - one of its definitive goals was "to be in a good pub so at least (in the worst case) if the topic of the evening was a disaster you could enjoy a pint and some food and feel that the night was not wasted". This was in part my feeling that at many BCS events that I went to years ago (when held at IBM Southbank) I ended up feeling hot, thirsty and hungry and praying that the session didn't go on too long so we could go for drinks afterwards. I think that over the years we've managed to maintain that easy going principle. TimM

As a somewhat detached observer of XTC, I have long held the suspicion - confirmed by what Kent says in the second edition of the WhiteBook - that XTC serves as the closest thing we know to a certification process for a local XP community. -- LaurentBossavit

I've found that the XtC membership has functioned as a barometer of both the spread and the dilution of XP ideas across London's IT community. In the few years that I've been attending we've gone from trying to do 'pure' XP in relatively small companies to being 'agile' within the confines of much larger companies and projects. In an odd way XPday exemplifies our departure from extremism (after all its "more than just XP") but it is also the one point in the year where we consciously reach out to the wider software development community with our current set of ideas. --AdewaleOshineye