How to fail at XP
Organiser(s): KeithBraithwaite, SteveFreeman
Session duration: 90 minutes
Session type: Workshop
Intended Audience:
The workshop is aimed principally at software professionals who have had their fingers burned while trying to introduce XP.
Session language: English
Description
You've convinced the management and the developers, rearranged the furniture, and even agreed a chocolate brownie budget for your meetings. Somehow, however, the XP migration just doesn't seem to be working. The build keeps breaking or delivery seems to be taking forever. How could this be? They never said anything about this in the books.
Not every XP project has been a glowing success. There can be difficulties and even failures when trying to move people in new directions. This is a workshop to discover anti-patterns in the process of introducing XP so that others may learn from our mistakes and spot the danger signals as soon as possible.
We're most interested in the problems of implementation, rather than getting the team to agree to start -- although the two are obviously related. We're interested in the nuts and bolts of running an XP team and how to cope with the issues that come up every day when you try to do this for real. We're interested in, for example, how XP enthusiasts can be their own worst enemy or how a practices, such as Test Driven Development, that are badly implemented can produce worse results than their plan-driven equivalents. We're also interested in the issues of responsibility and professionalism, and the need for self-discpline in Agile methodologies.
Benefits for participants
- Learn to spot early signs of an XP implementation gone awry
- Gain a deeper knowledge of XP in practice
- Benefit from other's experience of problems introducing XP
- Cathartic sharing of war-stories
Process
After a short introduction, the participants will divide up into small groups (10 minutes). The first stage will be for each participant to tell the group a story about a difficulty they've experienced with an XP implementation (30 minutes). The next stage will be for each group to discuss their stories and extract 3 anti-patterns with, if possible, antidote solutions (20 minutes). Finally, each group will present its anti-patterns to the whole workshop (25 minutes) and we will wrap up (5 minutes).
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