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ExtremeProgrammingName

I happened to see the ExtremeProgramming page in the RecentChanges and I read some of the discussion in the ExtremeProgrammingDiscussion page.

I wanted to talk a bit about the name...

I've just cut'n'pasted a couple of old blog posts from twelve71.com.

Discussions welcome....

''The Problem With Compromise''

The old saying is right: "A camel is a horse designed by committee." If the goal of marketing is to be extreme in some attribute, it's inevitable that compromise can only diminish your chance of success.

Compromise is about sanding down the rough edges to gain buy-in from other constituencies. Vanilla is a compromise ice-cream flavor, while habanero pecan is not. While there may be just a few people who are unwilling to eat vanilla ice cream, there are legions of people who are allergic to nuts, sensitive to spicy food, or just plain uninterested in eating a challenging scoop of ice cream. The safe compromise choice for a kid's birthday party is the vanilla. But vanilla is boring. You can't build a fast-growing company around vanilla.

In almost every market, the boring slot is filled. The product designed to appeal to the largest possible audience already exists, and displacing it is awfully difficult. Difficult because the very innocuousness of the market-leading product is its greatest asset. How can you market yourself as "more bland than the leading brand"? The real growth comes with products bthat annoy, offend, don't appeal are too expensive, too cheap, too heavy, too complicated, too simple - too something. (Of course, they're too too for some people, but just perfect for others. )

Bootstrapping entrepeneurs often upend existing industries because the dominant players in an industry are the last places you'll find empowered mavericks. The market-leading companies may owe their dominance to the Purple Cow they marketed years ago, but today, they're all about compromising themselves to continued profitability. The seeds of theior destruction lie in their dependence on being in the middle.

The word extreme is intended to be "purple" in the Seth Godin sense. It's remarkable, it begs to be talked about. What it "means", is that we follow the various practices at maximum intensity - code reviews, testing, requirements gathering, planning, design - all of these XP does many times a day, or many times a week.

Unfortunately, "extreme" is often interpreted as either dangerous and risky, or as flippant and devil-may-care. Extreme sports are mentioned, and "programming on a snowboard" is not far behind.

The reaction to this from most novice XP advocates is to suggest that we change the name. "Why not "Business-Value Driven Programming" or "Disciplined Programming". Someone makes this suggestion at least every 6 months on some web-site or discussion group.

I agree with these people that the name is often given as a reason for "management's" dismissal of the process. I'm sure it's just a convenient excuse, and not, in fact, a deal-breaker in and of itself. So maybe we could eliminate a convenient excuse by changing the name. Perhaps that would force "management" to at least look a little deeper and find a REAL reason it wouldn't work in their shop.

However, I don't think it's the word extreme that causes problems. It's that other word. The P word.

Traditionally, management care about getting this project out. They had a plan. It was good plan and it would have worked too if it hadn't been for those pesky kids...sorry, programmers. We're the reason it was late. That programming stuff needs controlled. It's dangerous and unpredictable and so it needs managed.

Software Engineering sounds better, doesn't it? Software Engineers are way more disciplined than programmers. Software Engineers are predictable, they use proper engineering practices to proceed safely and they have designs and stuff. TWe can always say when Analysis and Design are finished, it's that programming phase that always overruns.

I know, I know. I'm being (a little) facetious. But if I wanted to change the name of XP to give it more management appeal, I'd ditch the programming....it's the scary part (which also makes it the real purple cow)

XSE, anyone ? More bland than the leading brand. AlanFrancis -- 2004.06.22