My first experience of XP was excellent. Both days revolved around open space sessions and several other talks
Thursday’s talks
Testing Games Is Not a Game – It’s serious Stuff
As the title suggests, this talk was about testing in the games industry and how much testing is involved.
Lightening talks
Several people took it in turns to present a topic to the whole group that they would like to discuss in a smaller group. Each talk lasted for around 5 minutes and provided the xxxxxx for a group discussion with others that were interested.
Due to the amount of interesting topics, there was no way I could be everywhere. Therefore I had already spotted the talks that I was interested in on the timetable and decided to attend them.
TDD and asynchronous behavior
Evolving from Scrum to lean (Matt Wynne and Rob Bowley).
As a keen scrum practitioner, I can honestly that lean methods are slowly creeping into the scrum scene. Here Matt and Rob talked through a ‘war story’ and explained how they molded scrum to fit in at BBC Worldwide.
Key points:
- Value Stream Mapping to to analyze the flow of materials and information. The aim of this was to replace burn down charts, and stories into something a lot more visually meaningful. Also, story points where done away with and replace by number of stories done.
- Using a kanban board to show task movement. This seems useful for incorporating all tasks from concept and design through to development and release.
- The lean principal of “Stop the line”. As continuous integration was in use, if something was to break it must be fixed before any further development would continue.
It was extremely interesting and was rather a ashame this was implement in the final three months of the project. I walked away with a lot to think about and found the talk very beneficial.
Coaching self organizing teams (Joesph Pelrine)
I think Tom Hume sums it all up nicely
Friday’s Talks
Lean thinking: what is distinctive about it and where it is going?
To be hones I was a little disappointed as I only came away with just how poor the NHS is. However, it was interesting in how lean methods could potential help the NHS.
Open space session on agile tools
This was rather an interesting talk on what tools people are using within their agile projects. Add presentation
Open space session on web frameworks
The main frameworks that were brought up where :
- Groovy
- RoR
- Django
- Symfony
I think it is fair to say that they all had some very good point brought up about them all. Although there was no real conclusion, I walked away knowing that Django and Symfony are perhaps two of the better ones.
What I got out of the day
- Scrum doesn’t have to be implemented ‘out of box’ and its best to integrate other lean concepts into the lifecycle.
- Lean is the way forward and there are many other thinks lean can bring as i discovered in Matt and Robs talk.
- Testing, testing and more testing.
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