[jholman]

Overall, I appreciate and respect your thoughts about the relationship between the aspirations of XP, your experiences with XP, and XP-as-a-written-document (c.f. the pointing hand vs the things pointed at). Thank you for sharing them. And so I apologize if the following distracts or detracts from that...

My understanding is that C3 was a failure in every respect (except in terms of the results on the careers of certain evangelists). So I'm curious what you mean when you say "a technical success".

[mikekchar]

First, I have to say that I think you are right to call me out on that one. Especially since I was venturing into the territory of "projects getting cancelled because senior management is getting worried". I've been lucky enough to have passing conversations with some of the team members on mailing lists and met one or two more at conferences. I'll be honest in that I don't really know what went on there. My impression (and I'm happy to be corrected) is that the team members felt that the way the work progressed was a success. That's what I meant from the kind of caveat of "technical success". I don't think the project was a success from the perspective of delivering a product that the stakeholders were happy with (again, not trying to step on toes and I'm happy to be corrected). My main point in bringing up that project was more to highlight the conditions that might be necessary to get a group of people working together in that way -- namely that people were unhappy with the previous process.

It's hard to talk about this kind of stuff for reasons like you bring up. As you say, XP and the mythos surrounding it brought many people to the public eye that might not have been so noticeable. Although having lived through that time, Kent Beck and Ward Cunningham were pretty big names in the OO community even before XP. In fact, I doubt that anybody would have looked at XP (given that it is so strange) if someone lesser known had been behind it.

I struggle with this quite a bit. I've been lucky enough to meet and even work with some of the big names in the London tech scene. I mean, people are people and they sometimes have some pretty stupid ideas. They sometimes do some stupid things that don't work well. They sometimes don't realise which of their ideas are stupid :-) But without exception, they've been really awesome to talk to, work with and learn from.

I think C3 suffers a bit from the perspective of being "the example", even though it's clear that it wasn't all positive. I tend to look at it as the point at which the people involved realised, "Hey, this could work." When you decide to write a book about this kind of stuff, on one side you are being a good self-promoter, but on the other side you are really putting yourself out there. Is there some defensiveness there? I wouldn't doubt it.

My view has been to try to ignore the people behind the ideas. A lot of time you have to think to yourself, "How do I evaluate this idea? There are so many ideas. Which ones should I consider and which ones should I let go?". Unlike Pokemon, I think the secret is that you don't have to catch them all. Although there are many paths out there, my personal feeling is that there are probably not that many destinations. We'll all converge eventually. So follow the path that looks interesting to you.

XP is the path that took me the farthest so far. It's hard to give people advice because I can say, "I know XP can take you here, because I did it that way". I don't know any other way so far, so I can't give good advice on other good paths (although I can give a lot of advice about bad paths -- as I'm sure all experienced developers can relate to :-) ).

Hope that answers the question!