Laurents Experience Exchange Position Paper

 LaurentBossavit
 SpeakingForMyself? and PayingMyOwnWay? to XpTwoThousandAndTwo ;)

 4, impasse Morlet
 75010 Paris
 France
 +331 668 15 11 44
 laurent.wiki@bossavit.com

This story starts with a phrase borrowed from RonJeffries to suggest one disappointment that may await the XP advocate : "Fallen among thorns".

Quoting Ron, "XP is a discipline of cooperation, feedback, discovery, and learning. Companies that don't get that, don't get XP. In such a company, often XP will fall among these thorns and be choked out." (He wasn't as gloomy as this excerpt makes him out to be. I selected for shock value.)

Not all organizational soil will be hospitable to the seeds of ideas that XP sows.

We may either seek fertile soil to plant the seeds; or accept the soil we are given, and work that soil as best we can. In this exchange I will be concerned with the latter situation, which for various reasons I chose for myself over the past year or so.

I will attempt to extract the lucky breaks and the salient decisions from my experiences over these dozen-odd months, with particular attention to one aspect that has emerged to give them structure : my quest for a "larger intellectual context" to XP, which eventually gave rise to BookShelved. This will take us through the country of "ChangeArtistry?", over TheFifthDiscipline and like as not end up in even stranger lands.

Or such, at any rate, is what I hope to get from this workshop.