Thank you for taking the time to visit my blog. I’m not going to get into the details of how Dave and Ron communicate on the XP YahooGroup. Certainly both of them have successes and failures. Certainly I’ve disagreed with both of them at times, and agreed at other times. Certainly I’ve not understood what they meant at times. We’re all human and imperfect.

The relationship between reader and writer is a very unequal one. It does a writer no good to complain that the reader isn’t doing a good job of reading. In fact, the reader has no obligation to do so, or even to finish reading a passage. The onus of successful written communication is entirely on the writer.

The first job of the writer is to gain the reader’s attention, and to hold it, so that the reader reads at all. If the writer wants to challenge beliefs held by the reader, it’s also necessary to build some trust and credibility, lest the reader dismiss the writer’s work out of hand. Credibility is not built by reciting past successes, however. A glowing resume might induce a reader to open a work, but not to give weight to its words. Credibility builds on trust, and trust builds on shared understanding and a common ground. This is the essence of Naomi Karten’s advice on building a foundation for communication. Of course, Naomi communicates this much more effectively than my little synopsis.

I applaud your work as a hospice caregiver. I have known people who undertook such work, and I am in awe. I’m not sure I could handle the emotional stresses.

You are quite right that the stages of grief apply to more mundane situations than death and dying. My trouble is not in memorizing them, but in recognizing them in the day-to-day business world when I’m concentrating on accomplishing some task.

Please forgive me for speculating, but I am wondering if XP and other Agile processes aren’t, perhaps, disrupting your professional world. You have a long career that you value highly. Now this upstart methodology comes along and your deep experience might not be held in as high esteem by others. I get this feeling by reading between the lines of the written word, so it’s quite possible I’m off the mark.

If I’m even close, however, then I would like to find a way to allay your fears. Your experience is as valid as ever. Indeed, the practices of XP generally have roots that are decades old. XP is just a collection of these practices, along with principles and values to guide them, that seem to work quite well together.

And the kids, the young whippersnappers, they don’t seriously value long experience anyway. They have to build their own history of experience before they can do so.

I could not agree more with your section quoted from Ms. Karten’s book or your comments thereon. That was why I took such sharp umbrage to Dave’s comment as to when TDD should have been discussed. It is attitudes like that, that mark techies as people to be avoided. I keep most of my customers over decades, because I spend the time to know the people and their methods of working.

At the same time that such approaches are essential to the success of ANY project, computer or otherwise, I cannot see that the people on the forum seem much attuned to such niceties. Ron seems only able to repeat that he can solve all problems by sitting down with Chet and starting to program. Maybe, he considers discussions of things such as Ms. Karten’s approach outside the scope of what he wants to discuss.

Since XP is as much a philosophy as it is a programming method or set of techniques, it would seem that philosophical understanding of the process would hold more importance.

You might also find it interesting to know that I have not only read Kubler-Ross, but I have been a hospice caregiver. Some of her stages of dealing with death and dying can be applied to any major change in life or work. That is not to trivialize the difference between the loss of a loved one and changes in a programming environment, but such changes can inspire much deeper emotions than one might suspect at first glance.

If you and your boys would lower your shields a little and actually read what I write, I might actually be able to contribute something. On the other hand, I can hold my own at any level of conversation that is wished, without cursing or using any bathroom humor. If you guys cannot acquire a little equanimity in dealing with some actual criticism, nothing is likely to change very much, and you won’t need to memorize all those lovely stages. Having lived them, memorization is the least of my problems.

Word.