Lately, it seems I've ended up in a number of philosophical discussions about XP and the cults that followed, both with old friends and new. I had an epiphany while discussing this with my wife. My wife helped me realize that to the outsider XP looks anything but lite. The same for most of the other self proclaimed agilists. Why would that be?

For a variety of reasons, XP people seem to follow the rules that their tae-kwon-code methodology. Or at least they make enough noise about doing so, that they might as well be. Why would that matter? Iit's still a lightweight agile methodology, right? That's another debate, but again, people do it.

Cast yourself back to the pre XP revolution (pre OOSPLA 98 about). There were methodologies then too. How I recall the grand unifcation of methodologies that took place in '95. Lots of books and talks and consultants. I worked during those days at two different companies, both overseen by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. We had reams of manuals documenting our development process. When I came to Key, we had big manuals there too. But none of us really followed them. Or maybe they were so abstract and general and fungible in the interpretation thereof, that we all followed them in our own way. Either way, we passed our audits, did our documentation after the fact (some times). The "process" was like busy work that you filled in after the joy of coding.

An XP like methodology nowadays, supposedly has just a few simple, common sense, rules. They are often embraced by some subset of the actual developers (as opposed to foisted upon them by "analysts"). The simplicity and down to earth nature and buyin, means that the developers actually do the things, or at least talk excitedly about them. Debate them even. Not like the old days when we laughed at CRM-5 and stuff, or talked ourselves (and our management) into believing that we fit the mold. The upshot is that to an outsider (maybe an "old timer" who doesn't fit the trendy early adopter mold, or a trigger happy code warrior that just wants to blaze trails), working with an XP-ish team is one where they might actually end up having to really and truly follow rules, a defined process. It's an ironic twist that the perception of the XP community has evolved from revolutionary, to radical, to restrictive. Kind of a "Scarlet Letter" sort of progression.

Aside. For the record, I actually consider myself an XP practitioneer. I wrote an alternate SUnit (same interface). I write lots of tests. I've been known to happily pair. I like metaphors. I participated in workshops when it was still in its infancy stage.