Where Has XP Gone?

... and can we have it back?

 

Notes from the Open Space at XP Days 2009, London:

 

There doesn't seem to be much mention of XP this year at XP Days. This begs a few questions:

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• Why are we not hearing about it?
• Are people still doing it?
• Is there something wrong with the way its evangelised?

XP not mentioned much. Lots of people seem to talk about "agile" - but it's only a broad, umbrella term for lots of different things.

"We couldn't implement all of scrum in our start-up" - pretty depressing. Where else are you going to find such a great opportunity to implement XP? Green field site, no established procedures or rules, need for minimalism/efficiency... so why aren't people adopting it?

• fear?
• don't know how to do the practices because you can't learn them from a book?...

 

Why aren't people doing it?#

• cherry-picking practices
• Scrum addresses a broader range of concerns (business, infrastructure people, project management) - but doesn't address core technical practices
• Scrum left XP practices out to make it possible to adopt in 2 days rather than 6 months of training

• Perception by XPers that Scrum trainers can seem very patronising - since XPers already have the overwhelming majority of the scrum practices embedded in XP.
  • Perhaps Scrum Trainers meet lots of people that are totally new to agile - easy to assume that people don't know/haven't experienced agile development.
  • Difficult to take being patronised by non-tech scrum trainers: - "Yes, big deal. We've been doing all that for ages - and a bunch of highly technical, rigorous things that are essential that you can't do."

• Misconception: "We're doing scrum so we don't need to (pair|TDD|refactor|...)" Minimal scrum requirements as a licence not to do some or all of the XP practices.
• philosophy behind XP hasn't spread with the practices
• resistance to certain practices e.g. pairing, TDD, collective code ownership, continuous integration, building end-to-end workable chunks, not layers at a time)
  • discussion: not doing pair programming makes it difficult to have collective code ownership
  • discussion: people adopted continuous integration tools but didn't use CI tools for actual integration - they just used it as a test runner.
• people want more documentation
  • people misunderstanding XP ideas as "we don't need to write docs" rather than the "we're not going to carry unnecessary, copious documentation"
    • exposing cost of documentation - it is part of the product and not a free thing
    • who is the document for? - it must have an intended audience if there's to be any hope of usefulness

How do we explain the XP ideas?#

• encourage people to rediscover the XP ideas themselves
• use another name - "extreme" may frighten people. (Bankers may hear "extreme" and think "risky"/"flaky".)
  • Discussion in the early years of XP about the name - Kent Beck: "If they're put off by the name, this isn't for them..." (paraphrasing...)
• Getting people to see the importance and benefit of interactivity
  • Learning from interactive code - e.g. Smalltalk, Ruby, Python - just can't do this with long builds - too slow for interactive "listening to the code"
    • supposed to be easier to try things out rather than to discuss them at length
• Difficulties of explaining EvolutionaryDesign
  • perception of anxiety from some developers in the face of uncertainty & ambiguity
    • they want to decide up front to resolve the uncertainty & ambiguity be resolved
      • discussion: about speculative force-fitting patterns rather than "listening to the code"
  • suggestion: maybe it's worth trying to explain evolutionary design with a concrete example
• consider different learning styles - textual/visual/...
• explaining YAGNI - developers wanting to gold-plate things

• need to make Scrum masters aware of the need for appropriate engineering practices - minimum scrum requirements not enough
  • Jeff Sutherland's talk - says he hasn't seen any high-productivity scrum team that isn't doing all the XP practices.

What's missing#

• focussed too much on (technical) practices
• XP lead is only a technical lead - other issues need addressing e.g. business and infrastructure
• Scrum master has a wider remit - but how will non-technical scrum masters know that specific tech practices need fixing?

 

kral oyun oyun oyna