LessonsLearnedFromScalingXP

From SPA Wiki

I shared my experiences on scaling XP over time, management levels and size. This encouraged people to offer their own views on these issues, and also to raise the most thorny problems their projects were facing. Here are some of the main idea we talked about:

- The idea of using metrics as a behavior changing tool. We agreed that this can be used quite widely, and supports scalability in several ways.

- One risk area of XP: not being able to get a reliable or strong enough customer, as in a customer who gets overriden by others when the delivered product is presented.

- Building a system around XP, that in particular supports reporting to external managers, and making the project visible 'under their terms', was agreed to be a critical success factor of a large-scale/long-term project.

- Several people reflected on their way to report to external managers, and said that similar ideas to the ones presented have worked for them - in particular various variations of burndown charts.

- The high level of discipline required in XP, and how this comes as a surprise for some upper managers, or some developers who just 'want out' of any disciplined work.

- The need to use domain- or organization-specific metrics and reports to build a system around XP, which is required to make a project's progress I personally enjoyed the session, and learned a couple of new problems and solutions to take to my next project.

All in all I enjoyed the session and the interaction - thanks everyone for participating!

David