Matt Heusser, Jan 10th 2001
Assertion: Extreme Programming is just one development model that refuses to go down the slippery slope
of unrealistic expectation, “bargain” negotiations, and intellectual dishonesty.
The first chapter of XP Installed covers the rights and responsibilities of two groups in
development:
Manager and Customer Rights
1. You have the right to an overall plan, to know what can be accomplished, when, and at
what cost.
2. You have the right to get the most value out of every programming week
3. You have the right to see progress in a running system, proven to work by passing
repeatable tests that you specify.
4. You have the right to change your mind, to substitute functionality, and to change
priorities without paying exorbitant costs
5. You have the right to be informed of schedule changes, in time to choose how to reduce
scope to restore the original date. You can cancel at any time and be left with a useful
working system reflecting investment to date.
Programmer Rights
1. You have the right to know what is needed, with clear declarations of priority.
2. You have the right to produce quality work at all times.
3. You have the right to ask for and receive help from peers, superiors, and customers.
4. You have the right to update your own self estimates.
5. You have the right to accept your responsibilities instead of having them assigned to
you.
Notice Manager Right #5: If the developers are late and the customer runs out of money,
XP guarantees the developers have created real business value out of the money invested.
Under the waterfall model, a project that runs late and is abandoned might very well deliver
zero real business value.
Notice the Programmer rights: Self determination with integrity. No one can tell you “Just
do it all” or hold you to an estimate you wrote before you understood the problem, before
scope creep, and before you were hauled away to work on bugs for two weeks.
The key idea I picked up when reading the book was essentially this:
Actually listen to the people doing the work – including customers. Provide the
groups involved with the things they want in order to succeed in their own eyes.
Negotiation is not just about getting a “bargain” by piling the win conditions on your side of
the table. In the long term, the Truth, no matter how painful, is better than a lie.
“No one can tell you exactly, far in advance, just how long it will take to build software.
We’re just the only folks who admit it. What we can do, instead, is to teach your
programmers how to estimate the difficulty of each feature, and how to measure the speed
of implementing features.”
- Extreme Programming Installed, Pg. 59
“…Sometimes, though, you need to upgrade the stories difficulty. [Meaning: A feature
is going to take longer and cost more than you originally estimated] That’s not a bad thing,
because the truth is never a bad thing. Knowing the cost of things is how an XP team
steers the project to success.”
- Extreme Programming Installed, Pg. 41
Ayn Rand wrote a bit about this common recurring problem in our culture; that the folks
who do the work are so often ignored:
“When facing society, the man most concerned, the man who is to do the most and
contribute the most, has the least say. It’s taken for granted that he has no voice and the
reasons he could offer are rejected in advance as prejudiced-since no speech is ever
considered, but only the speaker. It’s so much easier to pass judgement on a man than on
an idea. Though how in hell one passes judgement on a man without ever considering the
content of his brain is more than I’ll ever understand. However, that’s how it’s done. You
see, reasons require scale to weigh them. And scales are not made of cotton. And cotton is
what the human spirit is made of – you know, the stuff that keeps no shape and offers no
resistance and can be twisted forward and backward and into a pretzel. You could tell them
why they should hire you so very much better than I could. But they won’t listen to you
and they’ll listen to me. Because I’m the middle man. The shortest distance between two
points is not a straight line-it’s a middleman. And the more middlemen, then shorter the
distance. Such is the psychology of a pretzel.”
“Why are you fighting for me like that?” Roark asked.
“Why are you a good architect? Because you have certain standards of what is good,
and they’re your own, and you stand by them. I want a good hotel, and I have certain
standards of what is good, and they’re my own, and you’re the one who can give me what I
want. And when I fight for you, I’m doing – on my side of it – just what you’re doing when
you design a building. Do you think integrity is the monopoly of the artist? And what,
incidentally, do you think integrity is? The ability to not pick a watch out of your neighbor’s
pocket? No, it’s no as easy as that. If that were all, I’d say ninety-five percent of humanity
were honest, upright men. Only, as you can see, they aren’t. Integrity is the ability to
stand by an idea. That presupposes the ability to think. Thinking is something one doesn’t
borrow or pawn. …”
And as Roark looked at him, he added “Don’t worry. They’re all against me. But I have
one advantage: They don’t know what they want. I do.”
At the end of July, Roark signed a contract to build the Aquitania.”
- Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead
“Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.”
- Master Yoda, Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (George Lucas)
(Often quoted by Kent Beck, father of Xtreme Programming)