CharacteristicsOfXpPeople

Inquisitive, argumentative, responsive to feedback, open to suggestion, good sense of humour, productive workers, convinced by demonstration / investigation, lazy by nature, team players, loyal, proud of their work, happy to share, enjoy closure. (Or is this just me? :-o TimBacon)

There's a curious thing happens when XP people try to wite down this sort of thing. We tried to write some marketing fluff for our web site so that potential clients would know how we work, and what we came up with was a bunch of business school platitudes. Which is no use, since everybody claims to be/do those things. The difference is that, being an XP team, we really are customer focussed, we really do form a partnership with our clients, etc. etc. It's no use saying that though. And I'm afraid that the this above suffers the same defect: it's almost a recruiter's buzzword list of desirable character traits. Which brings me on to...

This "team player" thing really pisses me off. I'm not a team player, not remotely. I play Go, not (god save us) football. It's not a team game. In fact, Go is more a game played against yourself than against whomever happens to generating moves against yours. I'm a biker, and I ride the lonely moor roads (see http://clublet.com/c/c/why?NotWorshippingIsNotAnOption#moors). I'm not a team player. Far, far too often "team player" is used to mean (in those self-same recruiter's buzzword lists) "Panglossian corporate drone", which XP people surely are not.

I'm not a team player. But I am a team worker.

Isn't what XP people are "compulsive collaborators".

-- KeithB I presume? To me a team player is someone who knows how to play in a team, which you certainly are, not a Panglossian corporate drone, which noone could accuse you of being. I guess this is just another demonstration of the words getting in the way of the communication...

Getting back to the point though, what character traits are common among people who have adopted XP easily? (And if this ends up being a recruiter's buzzword list then does that make it worthless?) I get annoyed at people who seem to propose that XP works for all organisations, for all people, all of the time. This is simply nonsense: some people (traits e.g. selfish, arrogant) will have more trouble converting to XP than others. And some organisations (traits e.g. prefer Panglossian corporate drones to real people with real personalities) ditto.

A recruiter's buzzword list won't neccessarily be bad, but it won't be interesting and useful unless it's different from the one a recruiter would use to fill slots on a , oh, say PRINCE project. If it turns out not to be different, that'll be a defect with the recruiters, not us, but just as unhelpful anyway. Let's see what we come up with.

Whach out for lazyness (a good start, that's not something you'll see on many recruiters' checklists ;). There are at least three kinds. We've a guy who, in the name of lazyness, will put far more ingenuity into his reasons why this case is exceptional and he doesn't need to write a test this time than he puts into any of his code. That's the dark side of the "unix laziness" that XP needs. Then there's just not being bothered. This fellow puts me in mind of a quality that many XP people seem to have (because he doesn't have it): they've been burned in the past, and they care that they've been burned, and they don't want to be burned again.

"Proud of their work" has two aspects, I think. Pride in their work products, and also proud of working well.

I'd add "procrastinators", and "disciplined in their work habits".

Speaking personally: curious (both meanings), idealistic, intolerant of inefficiency (where inefficiency is defined as one of: doing a repetitive task manually when it could be automated; injecting the same defect twice; implementing the same functionality in two different places; spending hours chasing bugs). --DarrenH³host³³date³April 19, 2002³agent³Opera/6.01 (Windows NT 4.0; U) en?³CharacteristicsOfXpPeople