We're Going XP!

Well, after Steve came and talked to our company for a day, it seems everyone here really does think that XP is something that we could benefit from. There wasn't even any overt resistance to Pair Programming! Which means that we have picked out a project to apply the XP practices to. (We start before the end of the month.)

Gee, I'm scared! And excited, but mostly scared. Honestly, I'm now responsible for implementing a methodology that is a highly disciplined and very intense. Very opposite to how things currently get done here. And I've tried some of the practices on my own over the last few years without being able to sustain the practice. The worst bit is that I know that there will be failures. I'm not talking catastrophic project ending failures. I'm talking lots of small failures. Not getting things the way they should be failures. It may be more fair to call them mishaps.

The flip side is that we get all the problems, via the mishaps, out into the open early and often. I intellectually know that this is a good thing. Not sure how I'm going to cope with this emotionally though. Now we can deal with the problems sooner and they should be smaller and easier to cope with.

Of course, this is all theoretical to me at the moment. But it is about time I start putting all of this theory to the practical test.