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Comment by doctor_eval | Hacker News Reader

I haven’t heard of C3 before, but I’m a big fan of reading about software project failures, and I’m not a fan of every aspect of XP, so I was certainly curious about this.

That said, the Wikipedia page neither supports nor refutes your assertion, and Fowler himself discusses C3’s failure here: https://martinfowler.com/bliki/C3.html

Fowler refers to notes that don’t seem to be in the Wikipedia entry any more: “In particular the entry in Wikipedia is misleading and incomplete, much of its comments seem to be based on a paper from a determined XP critic whose sources are unclear. Certainly its comments on performance are a misleading interpretation of material in my Refactoring book.”

Do you have any other links to this project? The fact that it went live and then reverted to the COBOL version is interesting.

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There is some discussion in C2 by the people involved about whether it was a failure or not: http://wiki.c2.com/?HighDisciplineMethodology

I believe the characterization of C3 as a "failure" is because it wasn't able to deliver the goal (goal was paying 87000 people – it only reached about 9000), and was later discontinued for multiple reasons (some unrelated, like people leaving, the merger with Daimler). The claim that "XP was banned" there seems overblown, it seems it's just that "people at DaimlerChrysler stopped taking terms like Smalltalk, OOP and XP" (per link above).

C3 was, by any measure, an abject failure. It got only the very basics working and then died when it ran into the vast number of unspecified exceptional cases (gee, where have we heard that before ...) that needed to be handled. And then got cancelled and completely reverted.

To then use such a failure as a marquee project demonstrating the supposed "superiority" of XP is unabashed chutzpah.

Now, large IT projects generally fail. So, XP is not wholly to blame.

However, the proponents of XP pushed it as superior silver bullet to navigate both the political and technical waters of software projects. The fact that C3 was such a spectacular failure simply demonstrates that XP really wasn't any different than any other methodology being pushed by people with an agenda.

A lot of the failure of XP was an assumption that all developers develop software the same way, and for all software teams XP’s tenants are optimal.

Practices like pair programming and TDD work on some instances, are absolutely terrible in others. The arrogance of the original XP folks was a hard core belief that they had found the silver bullet of software development, and then marketing it ruthlessly.

The article by Fowler cited some ancestors up says something along the lines of "the cancellation of C3 proves that XP is no guarantee for success". Regardless of whether XP works for everyone or not, that's pretty far from claiming it's a silver bullet.

That's what he says now--it's highly revisionist.

All these guys were in the "If it failed, it wasn't true XP." while they were cashing paychecks for promulgating it--Fowler included.

I was trying not to make any judgement call, but I agree.

To me there are worse things in the story, though: they tried to make User Stories and even customer-driven tests and ended up burning out the only customer that was able to do it.

It's not only underwhelming compared to the silver bullet they were selling in conferences and books, but it required some unicorn customer that they couldn't replace.

For years I saw people trying to make poor customers and PMs write Cucumber tests and man...

To me there are worse things in the story, though: they tried to make User Stories and even customer-driven tests and ended up burning out the only customer that was able to do it.

This is still a legitimate concern today with the "product owner" role that a lot of popular Agile processes rely on. In effect the whole premise of having a PO embedded within the team as the authority on requirements that are expected to change at any time means the entire software development process is built around a single human point of failure.

Definitely.

I think I draw the line at asking them to produce user stories, to me that's already too much. Asking them to use Cucumber or BDD rituals is probably against the Geneva convention.

There really is no silver bullet to writing software. You gotta keep a short feedback with users, and not overwhelming them is important.

> It got only the very basics working and then died when it ran into the vast number of unspecified exceptional cases (gee, where have we heard that before ...) that needed to be handled. And then got cancelled and completely reverted.

> To then use such a failure as a marquee project demonstrating the supposed "superiority" of XP is unabashed chutzpah.

> Now, large IT projects generally fail. So, XP is not wholly to blame.

One could argue that XP achieved a significantly better outcome than the typical project of that size. They didn't cause any big outages, and reached the end result of being cancelled and reverted much more quickly and cheaply than usual.

I suspect I have some cached references, but I would have to go dig a presentation out of my backups.

Unfortunately, all parties involved in the C3 project would rather that it be forgotten. As such, it seems that it is going down the memory hole even faster than most Internet things. :(

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