Re: Summing up and moving on (I hope)

On Thursday, December 12, 2002, at 8:35:05 PM, Bill Walton wrote:

> No offense intended here.  I have a couple of real questions for you.

I wonder why you would imagine that we would find real questions offensive.

> 1) What is it you hope to learn / gain from participating in this
> business-side discussion?

I am hoping to learn more about what real business people's needs are, and their
concerns regarding XP. I am hoping to learn what fears, er sorry concerns er
sorry issues they have with respect to it. I am hoping to learn how they really
respond to the various attempts we might make in communicating with them.

> 2) What is it you think you can contribute to this discussion, remembering
> that it's intended to be a place for business-side folks to discuss the
> business-side implications of XP to figure out how to best "argue" our case
> for the wider adoption of XP practices?

I feel that I might be able to contribute something. Here's why:

I have over forty years of experience in software development. My teams and I
have built nuclear weapons targeting retrieval software, operating systems,
language compilers, relational and set theoretic database systems, and financial
and tax applications. I have programmed with teams creating commercial-grade
software in Fortran, Commercial Translator, SLIP, LISP, IPL-V, Forth, C, Pascal,
C++, Prolog, Smalltalk and probably a few languages that I have forgotten.

I have advanced degrees in Mathematics and Computer and Communication Science.

I have worked at Strategic Air Command, and at the young age of 21 was already
interacting fairly effectively with light and bird colonels, and the occasional
general. I held a security clearance well above Top Secret. I have managed
programming teams and divisions full of teams. I have been Vice President R&D of
a company of about a thousand people, working and interacting with the other
executives. I have helped sell software to companies as large as IBM. I have
helped in court with a lawsuit against another large company for theft of our
software. I have met and worked effectively with CIOs, CFO's and VP's of
multi=billion dollar companies, and as small as a few hundred people. I have
called up the CIO of Chrysler corporation and made an appointment for an hour to
introduce her to Alistair Cockburn and chat with her on agile software
development.

I have shipped software earning about a half a billion dollars. I have led a
project whose failure put an entire company out of business. I have made nearly
every software development and human interaction mistake that has ever been made
and learned from several of them.

I have worked with stars like Kent Beck and Bob Martin and Martin Fowler, doing
XP and teaching it. I have directly, in person, helped over 300 people learn
what XP really is. I have written (with the able help of Chet Hendickson and Ann
Anderson) one of the earliest and most popular books on Extreme Programming. I
have written another book's worth of web pages on the subject and literally
thousands of emails answering questions and offering advice about XP.

Since it has been rather useful heretofore, I was guessing and hoping that some
of this experience and knowledge might be useful here.

> Your answers will help me a great deal in moderating this list.

I certainly hope they will. That's one of my fondest hopes.

Ron Jeffries
www.XProgramming.com
I'm not bad, I'm just drawn that way.  -- Jessica Rabbit


------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~-->
Get 128 Bit SSL Encryption!
http://us.click.yahoo.com/CBxunD/vN2EAA/xGHJAA/NhFolB/TM
---------------------------------------------------------------------~->

To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
extremecustomering-unsubscribe-hHKSG33TihhbjbujkaE4pw@public.gmane.org

 

Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/