Forgotten XP values

When Agile Sweden had its Christmas party one of the lightning talks was on how some of the XP values seems to have been forgotten now that agile is becoming more and more mainstream. I think we all can agree that agile is much about communication and feedback which happens to be two of the XP values.

The next one is simplicity. Simplicity is kind of built into most agile practices but many people forget about it. For example agile practices more and more often tend to be initiated by management rather than the people actually doing the work. This also means much focus is on tools. Nothing bad with fancy tools but in my experience the teams performing best (with agile practices) are those with the simplest approach to everything. So in my opinion, simplicity is in the danger zone.

One XP value that I think definitely have been forgotten is courage. Especially since agile is more and more pushed down by management rather than pushed up by the developers. In my years as a consultant I've seen so many developers that just go ahead and do as they're told grumping about what a bad decision it is to do something this way or that way. I've also seen a fair amount of architects patching and patching a doomed design rather than throwing it away and do it the right way. This can also be seen in developers in a small scale where they stick to a bad design even after they see it is a bad design.

The last XP value is respect. Since a few of the other values are forgotten there is clearly no respect for the values so by definition this value is forgotten too...