The longer version follows.

“There is a spike between the ones who say there is a spike and the ones who say that there isn’t.”

Part of the innate suspicion of processes with names (that falls out of maybe some of the stuff in your opening paragraph) means that, hey, maybe we’re working on the same project, but some of us care more than others about whether some regulator looking in would call it xp. In other words, there are metaphors, there are processes, and there is just observon-open-fire class _doing junk_. Making tests fail, then pass.

So we look at coworking and microcoworking falls out, arbcamp was the thing that it was, push3 has to become Nudge.

So maybe there’s a process thing in there, too.

But the values of “extreme programming” — such as they are — are crappy little monkey patches on the basic hierarchical, economic constraints of projects and teams and customers and employees coming together. And those are the constraints we’re picking at, or at least that I’m picking at. So what is that “Whole Team” thing actually about? We know it’s accidentally about a bunch of males in khakis and blue shirts (or, local flavor, jeans and warm coats), but what’s it really about? Especially when the “customer” is more like a “dungeon master” — a temporary burden rather than a gilded throne.

This strongly correlates, in my mind, to the question of when we do this. Is this a day thing, or a thing for night? For the week, or the weekend? At the cafe or the office? So far, it doesn’t happen at my office — and not just because the conference room still has an echo.

Where to? What next?