Chapter 2: Where Did XP Come From? (Chrysler Knows It Ain t Easy . . .)
Overview
Chrysler Knows It Ain t Easy
(Sing to the tune of The Ballad of John and Yoko by The Beatles)
We re not on the imagined schedule
The goal donor s been gone for a week
Won t our faces be red
When the mainframes drop dead
Chrysler s really gonna be up the creek
Chrysler knows it ain t easy
They know how hard it can be
The way things are goin
They re gonna cancel C3
Think I d better dust off the resume
The gold owner is getting real tweaked
Some people say
The project s goin away
Ya know the mainframe s gonna die in a week
Chrysler knows it ain t easy
They know how hard it can be
The way things are goin
They re gonna cancel C3
Everybody here is coding for today
Cause we all know that change is free
Last night someone said
Don t write a thing down
We won t leave nothing for them but the code
Project s goin south in a hurry
But I figure hey, why be meek
Let s go to the press
And just claim success
We ll have four book contracts in a week
Chrysler knows it ain t easy
They know how hard it can be
The way things are going
They re gonna cancel C3
C3 was the seminal XP project in which complementary practices and ideals were brought together and honed to form a single process. The practices had been around for a while, but C3 was the primordial soup that sparked the birth of XP as a single documented process. It s safe to say that were it not for the widespread perception of C3 as an XP success story, there would be no XP phenomenon today, and we wouldn t have felt the need to write this book. So, we feel that the C3 story is really quite important.
The story of C3 is one of high hopes, hype, and ultimately failure. It can be summed up by the following quotes (all cited later in this chapter, emphasis ours):
| HYPE! | The best software development team on the face of the earth. As of the first of February, 2000, the C3 project has been terminated without a successful launch of the next phase. The C3 system now provides correct monthly payroll information for more than 86,000 employees . It s [sic] success is ascribed to Mr Beck s golden rules. It paid somewhere just under 10,000 [employees]. It was hoped that it would pay all Chrysler employees, somewhere around 100,000. The impression amongst the folk I spoke to was that in the view of DC s management C3 was a disastrous project, and never the like shall be seen again there. None of this actually matters, because building a payroll systems [sic] was C3 s secondary goal. Never has so much hype been achieved by so few over such a dismal failure. |
In this chapter we piece together, from information that s freely available on the Web, the events that unfolded during and after the C3 project. We also analyze just why C3 failed and why many XPers still cling to the idea that it didn t really fail (despite having been cancelled when it was only one-third complete and late by several years ).
Although XP has progressed since C3, its core elements are still essentially the same (a description of XP as used on C3, in much rawer form than the practices described in the XP books, can be found here: http://www. xprogramming .com/
Practices/xpractices.htm). It s worth taking a look at that first project in some detail, because it highlights some of the major risks that are inherent in XP ” even today. In fact, reports suggest that the experience left a bad taste in the customer s mouth, to the extent that XP is still considered a dirty word in that particular organization.
There have been reports of successful XP projects since, most of them very small-scale . For the most part, however, the XP values and practices haven t changed, therefore the same risks still apply.
[1] For a description of the C2 Wiki, see the Big Words Like Constantinople and Termination Can Be Success section in Chapter 4.
EAN: 2147483647
Pages: 156