Bottom Up,Top Down or somewhere in the middle?

I have been consulting with a company and have been introducing XP practices gradually for a while.  I have discussed XP with a few
key people who support me in my efforts but mostly, I just talk about the practices like refactoring and TDD without mentioning XP.
The reason I have been doing it this way is to avoid being perceived as the typical consultant trying to push the latest trend.  I
have acquired the respect of the developpers and project managers and I am introducing practices to fix specific problems with their
process.  I have been acting as a technical lead for one of several project within one several division of this company.  Today, I
briefly presented CPPUnit and Test Driven Development to the architecture comitee of the division.  This comitee defines the process
and coding guidelines for the division.  I got several questions, a few vacant stares and a few impressed looks when I said that I
was currently running 130 unit tests in about 3.3 seconds (they have done most of their unit testing manually up to now).  Overall,
I think that the adoption of TDD throughout the division will go rather smoothly.

On the other side of the coin, the CEO and president of the company have been pushing for a few things like automated acceptance
tests and other things that would be inapropriate for me to mention here.  These ideas from the CEO make a lot of sense, and have
been proven by at least one of the divisions, but the CEO is getting significant resistance from most (if not all) of the
architecture groups and leaders of the other divisions.

I bring this up here because, since I joined this list (only about a week), most of the discussion seems to be about convincing the
CEO (or other C-level people) that XP works.  The fear I have is about the CEO's power to make the change happen, even if he is
convinced of the benefits.  Some good technical people can be very convincing and can offer a lot of resistence if they are imposed
something they do not personally believe in (yet).  In my particular scenario, most of the architecture groups of the other
divisions (including the one I am in) seem to resist these top down presures from the CEO, saying that the practices or tools that
are imposed from the top down do not make sense for them, even if they have been proven in another division, because the technology,
requirements and customers are different.

My question to this group(yes, there is a question in here somewhere), is this:  When XP is successfully introduced into a company,
does it usually come from the top down, the bottum up or from somewhere in the middle(project managers, technical leads or software
architects for a particular project)?

Pierre Boudreau


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