Overview of C3

C3, or Chrysler Comprehensive Compensation, was the XP poster-child project. Many of the claims about XP working on larger projects were based on the reputed success of the C3 project. In fact, many of the people (Kent Beck, Ron Jeffries, Martin Fowler, Chet Hendrickson, Don Wells) who wrote the XP books available on the market today worked on C3. Most of the initial 2 years worth of hype about XP came from the purported success of C3. Quite naturally, programmers who had no interest in doing design or documenting their work began jumping on the bandwagon. After that, XP books started coming out by the dozen , and the whole thing gained an aura of respectability.

To claim C3 as a success when it was a failed payroll replacement project that got cancelled after 4 years is, we feel, a total distortion of the truth. However, if you repeat often enough that a failed project was really a success, and you say it with enough conviction and gusto , over and over again (the marketing term for this is proof by repeated assertion, as in Cigarettes don t cause cancer ), then people will of course start to believe you.

If you look on the C2 Wiki s Cthree Project Terminated page ( http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?CthreeProjectTerminated ), you can find a very interesting discussion about this project and the impression it left on the folks at Chrysler. The Chrysler Comprehensive Compensation page ( http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ChryslerComprehensiveCompensation ) is also interesting. Everybody should read these pages!