Tea-Driven Development

As I may have mentioned I’m running a session at Agile 2009 called ‘Debugging Pair Programming’. There’s a preview of the session tomorrow night at Skills Matter and I’ve just finished preparing for it.

Mind if I run a couple of things past you?

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I going to be speaking (with my good friend Rob Bowley) at the forthcoming XP Day conference in London, 11th & 12th December 2008. Which means that I am now officially extreme. Dude.

Come to my talk if you want to hear my experiences of breaking a team out of the Scrum mould and doing some exciting stuff with value stream maps, Kanban boards and other techniques from the school of Lean Thinking. Come along if you want to hear about a world without task cards, exhausting planning days, and maybe even a world without estimates. Sorry Jason, but there may be some mention of coloured bits of card.

I’m actually one of only a few people with a scheduled talk, as the organisers have decided to use an open-space format this year. Which means you also have a chance to get up on stage and lead some discussion. After my last experience with an open space, I’d say it’s well worth doing your homework and really thinking about what you’d like to discuss at the conference beforehand so that you get the most out of it.

If you’re interested in building software as well as you can, XP Day is a great place to meet like-minded people, share experiences and develop ideas. It’s only small, so register soon!

Let me know in the comments if you’re coming, and what you’d like to talk about when you get there.

…was good fun, and well worth a couple of days off.

There’s a mixed crowd - some die-hard extreme programmers, quite a few self-styled (and self-promoting!) ‘coaches’ and a few newbies.

The atmosphere was really friendly - you would quite often find yourself sat in one session right next to the person who had been leading the previous one, so that and the often fun and interactive sessions broke the ice pretty quickly.

The first day was a bit flat for me, but after a night on the free beer courtesy of the sponsors, the second day picked up and really made it worth it. I wish I’d had time to stay for another session in the pub on Tuesday evening.

Key things I took from this conference, more detail on these later if you’re lucky:

• There’s a fairly serious backlash going on against scrum (I heard more than one person drop the ‘r’, although I think one of those was accidental!), certainly within the London / UK agile scene.
• There’s tension, which as I see it is between the coaching community and the programmer / creator community, who disagree about how much it’s OK to compromise on the original agile manifesto values and XP practices. I heard the phrase ‘valuing pragmatism over orthodoxy’ which summed it up rather well.
• Nobody, but nobody, works for ThoughtWorks anymore, not even Fred George
• You probably need to be working in Java if you want to get decent XP gigs, especially for a bank, and there’s quite a few people working for banks - particularly front office.
• Kanban is where it’s at, baby.