Chrysler Comprehensive Compensation System
The Chrysler Comprehensive Compensation System (commonly referred to as "C3") was a project in the
Project history
The C3 project was initiated in 1993 by Tom Hadfield, the Director of Payroll Systems, under the direction of CIO Susan Unger. Hadfield had developed a small object-oriented prototype which inspired the project. Smalltalk development began in 1994, with the aim of creating a new system to support all payroll processing for 87,000 employees by 1999.[1]
In 1996 software engineer
The plan was to roll out the system to different payroll 'populations' in stages, but C3 never managed to make another release despite two more years of development. The C3 system paid 9,000 people, representing the "vast majority of monthly Chrysler salaries."[4] Performance was initially a problem, with early estimates indicating it would take 1000 hours to run the payroll. However, profiling activities reduced this to approximately 40 hours, with another month's effort further reducing this to 18 hours. By the time the system was launched, the figure was down to 12 hours, and during the first year of production, performance was improved to 9 hours.[5]
A few months after the initial launch, the project's customer representative, a key role in the Extreme Programming methodology, resigned due to burnout and stress, and could not be replaced.[6]
Chrysler was bought out by
Frank Gerhardt, a manager at the company, announced to the XP conference in 2000 that DaimlerChrysler had de facto banned XP after shutting down C3;[8] however, some time later DaimlerChrysler resumed the use of XP.[9][not specific enough to verify]
Notes
- ^ Gerold.
- ^ Highsmith p. 298
- ^ c2 wiki on c3
- ^ c2 wiki on C3 project termination
- ^ Garzaniti 'Optimizing a Payroll System' in Fowler pp. 72–3.
- ^ C. Hendrickson, 2001, Will Extreme Programming kill your customer?, Position Paper, OOPSLA 2001.
- ^ Gerold; date is given in the usenet thread
- ^ c2 wiki on termination
- ^ see usenet thread
References
- ISBN 0-201-76043-6
- ISBN 0-201-48567-2
- Kevin J. Aguanno, Managing Agile Projects, Multi-Media Publications Inc, 2005. ISBN 1-895186-11-0, page 33
External links
- A short account of C3 on Martin Fowler's site, which is critical of this Wikipedia entry.
- VCAPS, a similar project at Ford Motor Company motor company, that was 'rescued' via XP only to be cancelled later on.