The XP Way

I have been definitively influenced by the book The Toyota Way: 14 Management Principles from the World's Greatest Manufacturer when I decided to write this article. In addition, recent debates about XP have greatly contributed to these following humble thoughts.

It comes from this question Where does XP goes ?

In France, it seems that XP and in a broadly term, agility have really engaged the attention of software businesses. However, implementing XP is not so simple. And many of those businesses have knocked bad experience(s). For sure, it's a commonplace to say that making a XP project working requires a good approach and people who have a strong development experience. But it is really necessary ? Why firms do no succeed after reading Kent Beck's books ?

The Toyota Way approach to business is very similar to the one that should be done by firms who want to implement XP. There are several values, principles and pratices around XP. Anyway, implementing them from scratch is not the good way from my point of view. I honestly think that you should first understand deeply XP and its philosophy. That's the XP Way.

The XP Way allows to build auto-organised teams which can create hight quality sofware around unitary test, pair programming and communication value. To that aim, the success key is not to have great experienced designers, but to create rather a XP philosophy that matches the values of your firm.

This personalized XP philosophy is easier to develop when you have XP developers in your team, but I am pretty confident that it might be put in place when everybody follows the same strategy : the XP Way.