XpAndProjectCancellation
The original XP project, "C3", was cancelled before completion: Cthree Project Terminated
Near as I can tell the fundamental problem was that the GoldOwner and GoalDonor weren't the same. The customer feeding stories to the team didn't care about the same things as the managers evaluating the team's performance. This is bad, and we know it's bad, but it was masked early because we happened to have a customer who was precisely aligned with the IT managers. The new customers who came on wanted tweaks to the existing system more than they wanted to turn off the next mainframe payroll system. IT management wanted to turn off the next mainframe payroll system. Game over. Or not, we'll see... -- KentBeck
Is this early termination something XP projects might be prone to, or did it simply come from a random quirk of C3's original embedding in Chrysler?
There are reasons to think that XP projects may fail - when they fail - more quickly than those on other methodologies; XP focuses very hard on the given set of customers but is silent about how to negotiate any wider political framework. Is it possible that XP, by its early delivery of working software, may make it harder for conflicts to be ignored and so be more prone to being derailed early by political misalignment? If so, then this could be viewed as a virtue of XP: if the political situation is such that delivery of a technological solution is actually not possible, then XP allows you to fail-fast, and brings the more fundamental political problem into sharp relief.
By contrast, a project run in such a fashion that delivery of contested functionality to production was more or less permanently delayed might persist for years - and be viewed as a "success" relative to an XP attempt.
(Anyone who thinks such projects could not possibly exist has been more fortunate in their workplaces than I have.)
See also: Delivery Is Not The Goal