September 7, 2005

Tom DeMarco recently called. The Cutter Technology Council is issuing a Council Opinion on Extreme Programming. I find these Council reports extraordinary. The format is like a U.S. Supreme Court position, where the topic at hand is invited for concurrent or dissent by the group. I find myself always wanting to hear how folks like Ed Yourdon, Tom DeMarco, Rob Austin, Ken Orr, and others weigh in on a major topic in IT today.

Tom asked if I would contribute a section on the productivity measures observed on XP projects. I plan to discuss “before” and “after” metrics from an actual company in the medical industry in the August Council Opinion. I compared cycle time, effort/cost, and defects in non-XP and XP projects against medical/scientific applications in our database of 7,000+ projects. Inquiring minds want to know… Enough of the “fluff”: what do actual numbers say?

By the way, I’ll be co-presenting this case study at the SD Best Practices Conference in September with Joshua Kerievsky, fellow Cutter author and XP expert. Come to the show!