WHY XP MATTERS TO YOU, NOW MORE THAN EVER

by Tom DeMarco, Fellow, Cutter Business Technology Council

From 2000 to 2002, there was an intriguing and active debate about the relative merits of Extreme Programming (XP; and its agile ilk) and the approaches advocated by the process movement, particularly the Capability Maturity Model (CMM). Today that debate has gone largely silent. It's not that the issue is less interesting than it was. What has happened in the interim is that globalization, and the move to offshore development, has taken a huge toll on the process movement's supporters. By mid-2002, for example, the membership of many SPIN chapters was more than 50% unemployed. Your best recipe to get laid off in 2002 was to be a process specialist. Your best recipe to still be unemployed today is to still be a process specialist.

The process movement, for all its merits, was a dream come true for those who would move IT work to cheaper distant locations. If you are CMM Level 3 at home and there is a CMM Level 3 offshore provider, moving the work at almost any stage is optimally easy. The crown jewel of process is a fixed specification, and this too is a boon to outsourcing. The consistency of method and approach makes the seam between the distant parties easier to live with. Just as important, the regular, methodical development projects that CMM worked best on are the very ones that were most attractive candidates for cost reduction.

That left a core of more complex projects: the ones that had strategic import, that affected the backbone of the organization, that required far too much user involvement to be successfully offshored. These too were the projects that were important enough so that cost savings were not at the top of their sponsors' lists. And these are the very projects in which XP and other agile methods work best.

Today, the project that is your worst candidate for heavy, fixed process and fixed specification is also your worst candidate to move offshore; this is the project that cries out for an agile approach. My point here is not just that XP makes you more effective and thus competes with offshore developers (after all, if it's so good, they can do it, too). Rather, it's the character of the projects that resist outsourcing that makes them naturals for XP. These are projects with constantly changing requirements and a maximum need for colocation of developers and stakeholders. If that's your domain, XP and the agile methods are for you.

Recommendations

• First of all, you and your developers need to know about and begin experimenting with agile methods. You could not do better than to begin with the second edition of Extreme Programming Explained.

• For yourself and your peer managers, Jim Highsmith's book Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products is a must.

• Jim's emphasis on "innovative products" is a clue to where your use of agile approaches should be directed.

• If there are no agile methods at work today in your organization, you need to lay the groundwork to bring such methods into play.

-- Tom DeMarco, Fellow, Cutter Business Technology Council