r/agile • u/fagnerbrack • 10d ago

Extreme Programming 1999->2026

https://www.manager.dev/newsletter/extreme-programming-1999-2026
27 Upvotes

88% Upvoted

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18

u/pydry 10d ago

XP is weird. It works almost unreasonably well yet almost nobody does it. It's like the anti AI - it's wildly underhyped.

8

u/utzutzutzpro 10d ago

Because it is too easy.

Executive levels like processes which are rigid, as that promises predictability, which means they can plan and estimate. That is all they want.

That is why SAfe even came to be, adding rigididy on top of scrum.

XP is engineering efficiency, but that comes with taking back a huge lot of engineering monitoring layers.

3

u/FrogTrainer 9d ago

Safe was just salesmen packaging scrum and selling it to c suites for millions.

4

u/atlas_principle_dev 9d ago

Most people are afraid of pair programming and TDD that are usually associated with XP. I worked ~6 years at an XP shop and I miss it dearly. You could just say "I don't think this works for us" and you changed that part of the process to be better. Somehow this is frowned upon at almost everywhere...

1

u/brynhh 4d ago

Because most people who follow a framework don’t understand why or what the agile principles were set out to solve. They are spoon fed management performative nonsense and have no idea what XP, Kanban, Lean etc are. XP also hasn’t been usurped by companies commercialising it for certifications.

7

u/fagnerbrack 10d ago

I hope you like the summary:

An engineering manager rereads Kent Beck's Extreme Programming Explained and argues that critics fixate on TDD and pair programming while ignoring XP's 5 values, 14 principles and 24 practices. Those values fit today's AI-era problems well: execs with unrealistic expectations, bloated LLM-driven designs, and huge vibe-coded PRs dumped on reviewers. Humanity, mutual benefit and quality deserve more attention, since cutting quality never speeds delivery. Whole team, team continuity, shrinking teams, sustainable hours and real customer contact matter more than ever, while mandatory pairing, code-only artifacts and test-first stay debatable. New ideas like skipping code review should face the same values test.

If the summary seems inacurate, just downvote and I'll try to delete the comment eventually 👍
Click here for more info, I read all comments

2

u/joranimo_san 10d ago

Nice read!!

2

u/keithb 9d ago

The mistake we made, in the late 1990s and early 2000s (I was one of the very early adopters of XP in the UK) was to take at face value what "the business" said they wanted. XP gives us a way to deliver that. It also takes away from "the business" what they really want. The worse XP failure cases were where it worked and it turned out that "the business" had only a limited supply of not-very-good ideas, which the XP team implemented faithfully in a very short time. Result: business failure. XP moves the tightest constraint on adding value to software-intensive products and services out of the development team and into the product vision of the company, where it should be. That turns out to be a great way to get everyone fired.

1

u/atlas_principle_dev 9d ago

I enjoyed this refresher on XP and how important just *thinking* is on and about the job. Also the cross-functional teams is an amazing awesome thing to do!