One XP experience: introducing agile (XP) software development into a culture that is willing but not ready

The main question to be asked is "Does Extreme Programming (XP) make sense as a development methodology in a diverse, multidisciplinary web development environment? This environment includes diverse, and perhaps, distributed teams requiring close coordination with multidisciplinary skills -- information architecture, visual design, XML, Java and others. The potential is to make the development process more responsive to users' needs and changing business requirements. This could have high impact on outcomes of the development process, decreasing cost, decreasing time to deployment, and increasing user satisfaction. The challenges are to adapt and reconcile the corporate and the agile culture processes and methodologies without seriously compromising either. We will discuss our experience from conception into implementation of XP through the first release that incorporates several iteration cycles. We will discuss the positive and negative forces and how they have or have not been resolved to date.