In and out of the agile closet

At the beginning, you don't know about XP. You just know you're unsatisfied with your work and that upsets you. Then you hear about some of the agile practices and they make sense to you -- for me, it was Pair-Programming and Planning Game. Then you try them out the best you can, and the make even more sense. Then you try the full XP thing, and you rock. But of course, you don't talk about it. You've tried at some point, and people laughed at you. They dismissed your opinion, they proved you wrong and you felt miserable. So you just shut up and do the best you can.

A group of XP fellows and I are trying to set up an XP Day conference in Paris, France, and we're currently looking for contributors. Interestingly enough, I've heard of one professional doing XP at work, and not wanting to report his experience to others -- because he prefers his name not being associated with the "extreme" stuff.

I've been there, too. In the shameless optimistic days I was discovering XP first-hand, I tried to shove agile principles in my colleagues' mind forcefully enough that eventually, people would stop listening to me the second I would mention the two dreaded letters. So I just applied whatever agile practices I could without getting too much attention -- in spite of measured successes, managers asked me (then ordered me) not to pair-program, not to code test-first. I ignored them, and I used to say I was doing "submarine XP". This, of course, sounds very disfunctional to me now, but what I find interesting is that I chose to accept this situation for more than a year, with no sound reason. I felt that there was nothing to do about it and that professional IT milieu was full of nonsense, so I should better cope with it. Whenever I was hearing workmates share what working as coders or managers meant to them, I knew that I felt differently and that it was pointless to mention it.

Eventually, I gathered enough energy for changing this state of things. I got a new job where I was paid to do XP coaching. I feel much better now, not only because I get some consideration for work that matters to me, but also because I can actually openly talk -- and be listened -- about my agile experience, discoveries and speculations. In a sense, my work is much simpler, although more challenging and exciting at the same time. It is not so much that people have changed, or that new times of understanding have come. It is rather I who eventually felt legitimated to think the way I think. Once I've resoluted to find a job where I could talk and act along agile principles, I've found one. Granted, it took some time, but I didn't settle for anything shorter than a coach position.

I believe that such a turning point is a recurring pattern in Extreme Programmers' carreer. Kent Beck opens his second edition of _XP Explained_ with an address to his partner Cynthia Andres: "Without you, this book would still be about programmers hiding in a corner. Without you, I would still be one of those programmers."

It occurred to me recently that "outing" yourself as an XPer is probably can be as difficult and daunting as acknowledging one's homosexuality. It's one thing to have different values, it's another to get others accept you the way you are. And the "corner" in which agile programmers "hide" looks very similar to the closet in which gays may stay and feel safer. Agile communities exist in real life and over the Internet. But how much courage does it take for you to talk about agility with traditional programmers at work? How do you feel when you do? Do you wish you were different, more like them? Do you think you could possibly be?

Next page, Kent addresses specifically to programmers and say: "Even programmers can be whole people, in the real world. XP is an opportunity to test yourself, to be yourself, to realize that maybe you've been fine all along and just hanging with the wrong crowd."

How true this sounds to me. Yet at the same time, I wonder why it has to be true, and when XP will be common enough that whoever hostile to it will count as part of no crowd...