Meta Meta Extreme Way

Some folk would like to understand the basis for including or excluding activities in XP, the methods by which XP has been and is being evolved, and ways they can try to test XP in their own developments.

Therefore,

There seems to be a fertile ground for discussion and it seems like a good idea to explore the issues on MetaExtremeWay.

As for trying XP, we'd sincerely welcome such experiments. Please let us know how things are going: we'll be glad to advise from afar for nothing or less. To be trying XP, you need to use the XP practices, not some other practices that are generated via MetaExtremeWay. MetaExtremeWay is someone else's made-up conjectures about how the XP gang are coming up with the XP practices.

MetaExtremeWay isn't XP and doesn't generate XP, at least not yet. --RonJeffries

MetaExtremeWay strikes me as fundamentally against ExtremeProgramming principles, and MetaMetaExtremeWay Extremely against them. So asking, " But if conjectures (not rules) presently on MetaExtremeWay don't seem realistic, why don't you follow the WikiNature ...?" asks a question not permitted of asking. A suitable alternative is, "But if conjectures (not rules) presently on MetaExtremeWay don't seem realistic, why don't you follow the ExtremeProgramming way, and do one project the ExtremeProgramming way, right now? If it doesn't look good, ReFactor your way of working, and Test it by doing another project."

The ExtremeWay is to not theorize about how it might in principle be if the world were otherwise, it is to design it here and now for now and here. Not that that is true, of course, but it is true for now, and here. --AlistairCockburn

If we are to refrain from reflecting on what we do, then we should just do and not describe what's doing. This is the best and purest way to do, but it leaves people reinventing, and often reinventing poorly.

See TheMostPureWay.

So XP is being written down. This is itself meta from the actual practice of XP. XP pages as they are written and as they are read are not the actual practice of XP. At best, we possess a certain warm feeling that writing XP down makes it more likely rather than less likely that its practice will grow. This is meta-XP - it's the actual practice of meta-XP.

Me, I like many XP practices just fine, and am adapting them to my use, but when simple questions and comments about meta-XP are declared "against XP principles", it's time to forget further inquiry and go find a methodology that can stand the light of day. --PeterMerel

I don't think that Alistair was getting cultish. It just seems to be in the spirit of XP that if you are spending an amount of time theorizing, you might as well be experimenting. It keeps things grounded. This makes sense because XP is an antidote for theory-boundedness.

Sometimes the best way of getting answers is indirectly. I learned some of what I wanted to know about the meta aspects of XP through ExtremeProgrammingChallenge and some of the subsequent comments. I do notice that XP applies to its own formation to a degree and I also notice that the principles are such that if you yank one you are tugging at another. There is more interdependency there than I noticed.

You can't put XP into one sentence, and it seems all the more better for it. No object in this system has too much responsibility, and without any one of the objects, it just ain't the same system. Isn't that what we want? -- MichaelFeathers

Indeed. What I wrote was," do one project the ExtremeProgramming way...If it doesn't look good, ReFactor." What I hear is you haven't tried it, you want to theorize about it first. If you do that, you certainly aren't following the ExtremeWay. To use the ExtremeWay, if there really is one, you should try it, first. Then say what didn't work for you and change that/them. I also theorize about XP, but in doing so I am certainly out of the ExtremeWay, and happily so. I have certain worries about XP, but I am waiting until I can try XP close to as-written, and then either learn or quarrel. --AlistairCockburn

I agree that actually doing is a very good way to learn/develop that thing called XP. But it seems like only part of the Extreme way to learn/develop XP. To do meta-meta-XP Extremely, you'd recurse XP principles yet again: Simplicity by refactoring XP pages until there are no questions left to ask, Communication by staying open and responsive to new content as it appears, Testing by doing and by asking those who do to share their experience, and Aggressiveness by taking nothing on faith.

But the latest bit of argy-bargy here suggests something new to me. Perhaps XP is less in the practices as they are written - as rules - and more a kind of group skill, like Soccer or Basketball. Sure there are strategies that you can put down for groups playing those games, but you can only accomplish those strategies by practicing them until your group has them as reflexes. Is this the way you mean, Alistair & Ron? --PeterMerel

Certainly that's what I'm getting at in my recent mystical posts. There is something visceral about really doing XP. It generates flow, the same kind you get in those few moments when you are doing your sport, whatever it is, unconsciously. It's like you are not doing it, just watching your body do it. --RonJeffries

I thank Ron for saying in those pages about what I would say. I just had an Experience - I tried describing normal incremental development to a senior designer in a COBOL shop that uses waterfall, top-down, structured analysis & design. The Experience was that the objections he gave to 3-month increments resulting in running code were almost exactly the ones I and others have given to XP! By the end of the night, I had not convinced him, nor was he in any hurry to try it. It was clear to him from his thought experiments that incremental development can't work, economically. So I learned afresh that there is a real limit to theorizing about these things, and a need to simply go try them and discover why they do work despite the thought experiments. As David Thoreau was cited as saying, "Some circumstantial evidence is very convincing, as when you find a trout in your milk." (took me years to figure out what he might have meant by that, but this seems like the place to apply it). --AlistairCockburn

What is Mu?

Nothing important - just another bone of contention, now discarded. It means "wrong question".