Simple things in life...

I was fortunate enough to catch up with Steve Hayes recently. I've always valued his opinion on XP and would love to work on a project he was coaching...

Anyway, I've always felt that XP was a good idea, but have never been able to find a project to work on with others and every time I've tried some of the practices, I haven't been consistent and lose steam after a short while. Two things came out of our time together.

1. Change of mental state is not a simple transition. As Steve wrote on the whiteboard, transition goes through 3 state (old state, chaos, new state) and not two states. An obvious observation, but something I think I have been suffering from, wondering why the chaotic state isn't the new state I had been looking for and reverting back to the old state. I flashed back to when I first starting teaching myself Java and can quite clearly see the chaos before the new state was reached. I was very enthusiastic about learning Java at the time, so I just keep pushing through all the bad stuff until things started to click. I haven't done this quite yet with XP.
2. XP is about Simple Design. Nothing new here, but what happened is that I think I finally get what this means. I've been trying to do XP with a big up front design model and fit the process around that. Let me tell you now, that doesn't work.

Simple Design is the one bit that has really thrown me off any personal success (or so I now believe) with XP. That coupled with not really pushing through with the methodology has left me feeling that XP is the better road to travel but with no direct evidence that this is so.

These insight have re-ignited my passion for adopting XP practices. I'm hoping this will get me through the chaos ahead...