Beautiful Teams

Future Projects

After the success of our first project, Fred wanted to get a few more teams to go extreme. This turned out to be more difficult than expected. First of all, Fred wanted to run each of the other teams the same way as our original team. "This is the way we do pilot projects," Fred told me. Of course, BBS has a process for trying new things, and we could not break that mold!

I warned him not to force each team into the exact same practices. I did not think it would work. Each team is unique and each team member has unique skills. There will be differences, and they won't own the process the way we did.

Well, we tried it anyway. The projects were successful, delivering two to three times more high-quality software per plug-replaceable-programmer days than the standard BBS development project. But as much as we tried, we could not get each team to follow the exact same practices. Of course, much of the core was the same, but there were many variations. Each team found its own way.

Some of the biggest obstacles I encountered were cultural. Their culture included pride in the processes they developed and followed. Those processes helped them do many great things. But they needed to get faster. Something had to change, but the culture resisted change. A year later, I spoke to a lead engineer in a nearby group and asked him whether his team was doing XP. He told me it was too much trouble. A team that wanted to go Extreme, as Bud called it, had to put together a 30-page process ...