On Tue, 2004-10-26 at 17:51, Ken Boucher wrote:
>
> Agreed. My question is, given the kind of people we're talking about,
> would you get better results with an agile process? I don't know. I
> suspect not. I almost feel that a lot of the "failiure to adopt XP
> tales" may be issues of trying to work with the people available.
I'm suspicious that there are really clear categories of people along
the lines you describe. "Smart" is a continuum, not a boolean state, and
the same goes for the ability to get things done. Even the most
accomplished people I know spent years unable to read and write, so I'm
reluctant to write people off as unsalvageable.
I've not yet met any professional programmer who I was sure couldn't
work better within an agile process, barring a couple with what I
suspect are organic brain issues. And I've never met anybody who, until
they had done XP for a while, didn't have to do both some learning and
some unlearning to be able to do XP well.
The questions I ask myself about any group of potential XP adoptees is
how far each person has to go, how fast they can move, and how the
environment helps and hinders their progress. If I were looking for a
explanation for a lot of the XP adoption failures, I'd say it's a
bootstrapping problem.
A smoothly running XP team is the best environment to learn XP; even if
you have a lot of bad reflexes from waterfall experience, being on a
good XP project reduces the damage caused by those reflexes and provides
quick feedback to help you learn better behaviors. But the worse the
environment is, the harder it is to get XP up and running, as the
environment rewards and punishes the wrong things.
Of course I may just be a softie, but I'd never recommend giving any
developer the boot as part of an XP adoption. I am inclined to sort
people in ease-of-adoption order and start with the easy cases first;
that gives me a better environment to tackle the difficult ones.
The worst outcome I can imagine is that the team environment would make
it obvious that an individual just isn't able to work at the level of a
professional programmer and is unable to learn despite spending five
days a week pairing. But Dilbert and Office Space not withstanding, I
think the fraction of our colleagues like that is pretty small.
William
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