| Er, no. First, Scrum is not XP. Huge difference. Second, even XP is not a "magic bullet". Nothing is. It's work that works. (Scrum, on the other hand, is not a "magic bullet" but simply a "bullet". Use it to kill projects very effectively). Third, at my first real job after uni, we did most of the XP-like practices, and it worked amazingly well. But we didn't know about "XP". Partly because it didn't exist yet, as this was around the same time the Kent Beck started at Chrysler Comprehensive. When the XP books came out it was fun to have a name for what we had been doing so successfully. And also to compare and contrast. Fourth, I had a great side-by-side natural experiment during my tenure at the BBC. My team did XP-ish things, mostly the technical practices, so test first/TDD, YAGNI etc. Pairing when necessary, but we were co-located around a desk "island" (sort of the way journalist workspaces are organised). My team succeeded far beyond expectations [1] The team next to us, larger, more important and with way more experienced developers did SCRUM, but not XP. That project had to be rebooted completely after 2 years. [1] https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4614-9299-3_... |