The single most important thing my years of doing XP helped me learn, specifically TDD and refactoring, is about the size of the steps. When I started it, I had in mind “small steps” that were, well, they weren’t really small at all, just “comparatively less gigantic”. Graybeards like me came up a certain way. We relied heavily on 1) large and well-organized memory, 2) a facility for rapid transition back and forth between high-structured high-detail imperative text and ordinary meaning, 3) an ability to imagine large transformations “whole”. It’s a curious contradiction, to me, that these attributes were what enabled me to be a good geek, but ultimately, my universal and heavy reliance on them actually prevented me from stumbling into mastery.

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