This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz by James Robertson. Original Post: Productivity questions Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants Feed URL: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/rssBlog/rssBlogView.xml Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general. Latest Agile Buzz Posts Latest Agile Buzz Posts by James Robertson Latest Posts From Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants

David Anderson http://www.agilemanagement.net/Articles/Weblog/WorldClassVelocity.html points out that no one believes the productivity claims of XP/TDD advocates:

So is it any wonder, when I tell people (indeed, show them with metrics) that agile development team A is 5 times more productive than team B who in turn are twice as fast as team C at another location, that people don't believe me? After all, these programmers are only human - right? How can it be possible to go 10 times faster? Just what kind of drugs do you take to make that possible? Is it time we banned these prescriptions with names like FDD or TDD or XP in order to level the playing field for everyone else? Perhaps some police raids to dig out the story cards and some spy equipment to detect morning stand up meetings? It is disgusting that some developers can go so quickly. It has to be stopped!

No one believes the relevant numbers about Smalltalk vs curly brace languages either. I guess believing the claims would cause heads to explode and world views to be rearranged. Simpler to just be Vizzini, and shout "inconceivable!"