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I worked in a place where we took XP very seriously. The culture supported it. And I can say that place was one of the best places to work and learn in. Fast f

I worked in a place where we took XP very seriously. The culture supported it. And I can say that place was one of the best places to work and learn in. Fast forward a couple years and I land in a full remote team as a tech lead/manager role. I try to bring XP into the team, and the pain was real. Not a single person would get behind it. Needless to say, the culture of the entire org plays a huge role in the success of XP.

phoronixrly 2y ago
I can also attest to having a similar experience with scrum. I've seen it thrive in a single company I worked with, coupled with sharp product managers that know their shit better than any of us developers but at the same time take feedback to heart. Never experienced it since... Each following employer has abused scrum to a/ say in front of stakeholders that scrum is in use and b/ utterly fail to use purely time-based estimations for tasks as a metric to a team's or a team member's performance. All this coupled with inept PM.
- ryandvm 2y ago
  To me, a solution that has a 10% success rate is a bad solution.
AnimalMuppet 2y ago
I too have worked at a place that took XP very seriously, and it worked very well. For us, the way it fell apart was the interface to upper management. Upper management didn't want to hear about story points and picking the most compelling features for a release. They wanted to see normal development plans and progress reports. They felt like we couldn't be under control if we were developing in an XP way. It's not that we failed to deliver. It's not that we were behind schedule. It's that upper management wasn't comfortable. By the way, one of the things we did was to hack our own process. (If you're trying to be agile by a rigidly defined process, you're not agile.) So a couple of the leaders would talk for a bit, and then they would say, "For the next two sprints, we're going to try changing the process in X way. After two sprints, we'll reevaluate." Drive toward a process that fits your team.

phoronixrly 2y ago

I can also attest to having a similar experience with scrum. I've seen it thrive in a single company I worked with, coupled with sharp product managers that know their shit better than any of us developers but at the same time take feedback to heart. Never experienced it since... Each following employer has abused scrum to a/ say in front of stakeholders that scrum is in use and b/ utterly fail to use purely time-based estimations for tasks as a metric to a team's or a team member's performance. All this coupled with inept PM.

ryandvm 2y ago
To me, a solution that has a 10% success rate is a bad solution.

AnimalMuppet 2y ago

I too have worked at a place that took XP very seriously, and it worked very well. For us, the way it fell apart was the interface to upper management. Upper management didn't want to hear about story points and picking the most compelling features for a release. They wanted to see normal development plans and progress reports. They felt like we couldn't be under control if we were developing in an XP way. It's not that we failed to deliver. It's not that we were behind schedule. It's that upper management wasn't comfortable. By the way, one of the things we did was to hack our own process. (If you're trying to be agile by a rigidly defined process, you're not agile.) So a couple of the leaders would talk for a bit, and then they would say, "For the next two sprints, we're going to try changing the process in X way. After two sprints, we'll reevaluate." Drive toward a process that fits your team.