Extreme Programming Refactored: The Case Against XP
Overview
Chrysler Knows It Ain t Easy
(Sing to the tune of The Ballad of John and Yoko by The Beatles)
We re not on the imagined schedule The goal donor s been gone for a week Won t our faces be red When the mainframes drop dead Chrysler s really gonna be up the creek
Chrysler knows it ain t easy They know how hard it can be The way things are goin They re gonna cancel C3
Think I d better dust off the resume The gold owner is getting real tweaked Some people say The project s goin away Ya know the mainframe s gonna die in a week
Chrysler knows it ain t easy They know how hard it can be The way things are goin They re gonna cancel C3
Everybody here is coding for today Cause we all know that change is free Last night someone said Don t write a thing down We won t leave nothing for them but the code
Project s goin south in a hurry But I figure hey, why be meek Let s go to the press And just claim success We ll have four book contracts in a week
Chrysler knows it ain t easy They know how hard it can be The way things are going They re gonna cancel C3
C3 was the seminal XP project in which complementary practices and ideals were brought together and honed to form a single process. The practices had been around for a while, but C3 was the primordial soup that sparked the birth of XP as a single documented process. It s safe to say that were it not for the widespread perception of C3 as an XP success story, there would be no XP phenomenon today, and we wouldn t have felt the need to write this book. So, we feel that the C3 story is really quite important.
The story of C3 is one of high hopes, hype, and ultimately failure. It can be summed up by the following quotes (all cited later in this chapter, emphasis ours):
| HYPE! | The best software development team on the face of the earth. ”Chet Hendrickson As of the first of February, 2000, the C3 project has been terminated without a successful launch of the next phase. ”From the C2 Wiki [1] The C3 system now provides correct monthly payroll information for more than 86,000 employees . It s [sic] success is ascribed to Mr Beck s golden rules. ” The Economist, December 2000 It paid somewhere just under 10,000 [employees]. It was hoped that it would pay all Chrysler employees, somewhere around 100,000. ”Ron Jeffries The impression amongst the folk I spoke to was that in the view of DC s management C3 was a disastrous project, and never the like shall be seen again there. ”From the C2 Wiki None of this actually matters, because building a payroll systems [sic] was C3 s secondary goal. ”Chet Hendrickson Never has so much hype been achieved by so few over such a dismal failure. ”Doug Rosenberg |
In this chapter we piece together, from information that s freely available on the Web, the events that unfolded during and after the C3 project. We also analyze just why C3 failed and why many XPers still cling to the idea that it didn t really fail (despite having been cancelled when it was only one-third complete and late by several years ).
Although XP has progressed since C3, its core elements are still essentially the same (a description of XP as used on C3, in much rawer form than the practices described in the XP books, can be found here: http://www. xprogramming .com/
Practices/xpractices.htm). It s worth taking a look at that first project in some detail, because it highlights some of the major risks that are inherent in XP ” even today. In fact, reports suggest that the experience left a bad taste in the customer s mouth, to the extent that XP is still considered a dirty word in that particular organization.
There have been reports of successful XP projects since, most of them very small-scale . For the most part, however, the XP values and practices haven t changed, therefore the same risks still apply.
[1] For a description of the C2 Wiki, see the Big Words Like Constantinople and Termination Can Be Success section in Chapter 4.