Jason Bock writes about his experience with Extreme Programming for the last year. I like retrospectives (see Johanna Rothman's blog on Managing Product Development for a good set of questions to use in a retrospective) and people reflecting on experience and thought some of his observations were useful.

Things he likes:

• TDD and refactoring - makes it easy to change the code knowing that tests will pick up any problems.
• Pair programming because it gives quicker feedback on the work as it's being done.

Things he doesn't like:

• Stories. He thinks that the concept is too vague and there isn't enough investigation given to system requirements
• Feeling of it being a religious practice. It's better to treat them as a set of practices rather than religious commandments.
• The coaches often refer to 'the scriptures'. Jason says 'it's weird to hear the XP coaches that the company brought in for these projects to say "Well, the XP process says …".' rather than considering what practices might work.
• He thinks it's harder to get a pulse on the project as a whole. This is interesting as would have thought that the frequent iterations would have generated some

Overall I like the sound of Jason's pragmatism when he says that for him it's a lot more important to 'get it done!'. I've always liked the question 'what do I need to do today to make this product ship on time in future' (I think I read this in Microsoft Secrets years ago).