Kevin's Weblog

One of the things which has always bothered by about XP is the “my way or the highway” attitude in some of the literature. What I’m talking about is the statements along the lines of, “I don’t care if you want to program some other way, just don’t do it on my team”.

Yesterday I was talking with someone who has spent most of the last two years working in an XP shop. It came out that in the 3 months after they started using XP, they experienced 50% turnover in their development team. He didn’t seem too bothered by this, but I think that most of the respected experts in software development process (say Brooks, or DeMarco and Lister) would say that you’d have to be insane to adopt a methodology (or take just about any action) that results in this level of turnover. The costs to the organization are so immense that it’s almost guaranteed to be a bad idea.