And Now for something Completely Different

A few months ago, I signed up for a couple of Agile/XP/Cute-Word-Of-The-Day programming email groups.  There is good information in some of the posts, but like any group, there are some complete tools (I'll leave it up to you to decide if I'm the 'tool' in this group).

Anyway, an email showed up from an Ibrahim Uludağ looking for some critiques on his masters thesis.  It appears Mr Uludağ didn't do such a good job in the originality department.

Instead of simply telling Ibrahim what was wrong, however here's what one of the 'leaders' of the XP movement decided to do:

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you a textbook example of why Ron Jeffries is a tool and does more to damage the cause of XP than help it:

scrumdevelopment email list wrote wrote:

On Friday, May 5, 2006, at 3:27:21 AM, İbrahim Uludağ wrote:

> My Ms Thesis is about xp@scrum. It has almost finished. I want to hear
> your commnets about this.
>
> The adress of my thesis is http://www.xpscrum.com/xpscrum.pdf

I have sent a detailed report on the paper to the author and his advisor. It seems that almost every sentence in the paper can be found on the web. Here is the conclusion of my emails to the author and his advisor:

> The paper contains little or no original work that I can detect.
> Nonetheless it is a fairly coherent job of finding and pasting
> together useful material about Scrum and XP (though I would strongly
> repudiate some of the ICONIX-related speculation).
>
> In view of the character of the paper, I believe it should be more
> clearly labeled as a survey of the literature, so that there's no > confusion that it does not describe original work. The references
> section needs to be beefed up substantially, and the main text should
> be much more clearly quoting when it uses large verbatim chunks of
> material from sources other than the author.

Ron Jeffries
www.XProgramming.com