But wait, there's more! XXP recognizes that the mad folly of the typical runaway software project, months behind schedule, millions over budget, unable to serve up even the most basic functionality and riddled with an infinitely multiplying nest of inter-breeding bugs, is all due to the underlying alienated personality of the most "brilliant" programmers. It is the Asperger's Syndrome, and even outright autism, of the male-dominated programming profession that is to blame, and XXP doesn't shirk the duty to solve that problem. For self-serving reasons, the tech industry, until now, has failed to recognize this basic flaw in the way programming is traditionally done.

But in XXP the Mixed Pairs must have an average Autism Quotient(AQ) of less than 20, meaning that the more, lets us say out to lunch one half of the team is, the more hip and stylish the better half must be. The result is that when for example, a Mixed Pair is assigned the simple task of fixing a drag-and-drop bug in a GUI application, there will be someone there to put his or her (probably her) foot down when the code "genius" (har!) of the team wants to fix the bug by inventing a new dialect of PEARL and porting the entire app over before addressing the bug itself.

Intrigued? Welcome to the future of programming.

That is XXP in a nutshell. Keep in mind that it is founded on XP, a subject that I have not covered in detail. XXP includes all the practices of XP, but takes them to an even more eXtreme eXtreme.

The main way that XXP will be put into effect is by a new system of affirmative action, both in university computer education and in the workplace, to achieve perfect gender parity in the programming field within 10 years. Once that balance is struck, the task of forming Mixed Pairs will be a snap.

What about the programmer shortage? Isn't it madness to kick so many men out of the programming field? Right now just under one third of programmers are female, so to achieve gender parity means eliminating over half the men. Can it be done?

Yes! The problem with the entire computer and information technology sector is the prevalance of hacking and the pervasive incompetence that drags down every aspect of the endeavor. Why do computers cause so much frustration in our society? If it isn't hacking, it's bugs. If it isn't bugs, it's cost overruns. Or hardware and sofware incompatibilities. Or confusing standards. The list goes on. And who is responsible for all this?

Men.

Think about it. Can you name one single female hacker? Look at any list of convicted hackers, and you'll see the infamous Kevin Mitnick, the legendary Cap'n Crunch, or the more recent Dmitry Skylervich. But a single woman? Absurd. Women flat out do not hack, and that is exactly the kind of person the computing field desperately needs.

Aside from hacking, the woes of computing all have men as their root cause. No matter if you are complaining of some supposed misdeed by Micro-Soft, or the riotous havoc of the Lunix hacker operating system, or the classical intrigues of I.B.M. in the distant past, there is one common element. Male computer geeks run rampant, with no mitigating factor to reign in their insane obsessions and unrealistic, inhuman dreams of machines that will do everything except work right.

XXP holds the answer.