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Robert Austin's latest book, Artful Making, presents an extended metaphor of agile design processes in general (with a firm nod in the direction of Extreme Programming and agile software development) as akin to the production of a play for the theatre.

Reading the book recently provided a frame which got triggered when someone on the Extreme Programming list asked what "revisions" had been made to the method since Kent Beck's book first came out.

The question is a bit like asking what revisions were made to Hamlet since it first came out. The answer has to be either "none" or "as many as the number of times the play was staged". Austin makes that point forcefully - it's not the script that gets revised; rather, the play consists of the script, which is fixed, and the production, which changes not just with each cast and director but also (within a more constrained range of variation) from one show to the next.

If you were to observe an Extreme Programming project today, you should expect to see something rather different from the first few XP projects; the point of an "artful" process is precisely not repeatability. But they would still be using the exact same script.