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Tools: Fitness, Selinium, Cucumber

Jeff... ? http://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffdeskins

Intro to Extreme Programming (XP)

What?

  • Improve quality and responsiveness in the face of changing requirements.

Why?

  • Tired of failed development efforts.
  • Tracking percentage complete.
  • Lots of bugs, latency, horrible UAT.

Values

Communication

  • Over-communicate with the full team involved.
  • Daily, everyones always up to date.

Simplicity

  • Strive to achieve the minimum viable product to be successful.
  • Don't want all requirements up-front.

Feedback

  • Continually make our process better.
  • Continuous integration, making sure our builds are always successful.
  • Become aware of problems as soon as possible.

Courage

  • Say what needs to be said; fix what needs to be fixed.
  • It's ok to be wrong, transparency is key.
  • Don't hide from problems/isses, they always catch up to you.

Respect

  • Analogy of a family, we can disagree but be respectful.

Principles

Humanity

  • People write software (for now) and humans have needs.
  • We should all feel sucessful and adequate.

Economics

  • Technical Success != Business Success
  • Are we meeting business goals?
  • Don't waste client's money/time.

Mutual Benefit

  • Stive for win-win i.e. solid prioritization and proper documentation.
  • Don't put unecessary burdens on maintainence team.

Improvements

  • Relentless refactoring
  • Automated testing
  • Tie it all together with continuous integration

Diversity

  • Multiple skillsets on your team. Take advantage of everyone's unique ability.

Reflection

Flow

  • Continual flow through iterations.
  • As opposed to waterfall-like rigid steps.

Opportunity

  • Turn problems into opportunities.
  • Build always broken? Automate the build and testing.

Redundancy

  • Pair programming can catch defects.
  • CI servers running test suites.
  • SQ teams work along-side devs as they complete their stories.
  • Goal is to show customers as it's completed. What's done is truly done and tested.

Failure

  • It's ok to fail as long as you fix it and improve.
  • Not ok to fail continuously.

Quality

  • More important than speed, never sacrifice.
  • Push quality to it's limits.

Baby Steps

  • Don't make huge changes at once. Build iteratively and test frequently.
  • TDD helps make calculated changes.
  • Checkin multiple times per day if possible.

Accept Responsibility

  • Team signs up for work as a whole and estimates responsibly.
  • Team is responsible for delivering on-time.

Practices

Whole Team

  • All team diciplines
  • Iteration Manager
  • Co-Locate team if possible. Communication inherantly suffers when team is geographically seperate.

Informative Workspace

  • Information should be accessible.
  • Anyone can come in the room and know exactly where you're at.
  • Walls should tell the story, keeps us transparent/accountable.
  • Burndown Charts!

Energized Work

  • Srive for forty-hour work weeks. Overtime introduces technical debt and hurts quality.
  • Some overtime is ok, but be careful.

Pair Programming

  • Two team members actively coding together, should play off of each other's ideas well.
  • Task-oriented development.

User Stories

  • Physical index cards can help stay business-oriented.
  • Customer-driven functionality, no techy terminology.
  • We're trying to live in their world, they make the decisions.
  • Push ideas off to the backlog so they can incubate and develop instead of rushing into implementing bad ideas.

Estimation

  • Estimate in terms of story-points.
  • Use historical data and obtain an good measure of average velocity.
  • Keeps realistic expectations and allows you to guage progress well.

Criteria

  • Provided for every story, minimizes assumption.
  • Keeps full team on the same page.

Planning

Releases

  • Business defines the release dates.
  • Always hit the dates, but functionality is variable.

Iterations

  • Business prioritizes stories for each iteration.
  • They are essentially making the decisions on what features are implemented first.

IPM

  • First day of iterations. Review what stories are being played.
  • Review acceptance criteria.

Slack

  • Team needs slack time.
  • Allows time to clean up the process and experiment.
  • New technologies NEED to be played with.

Continuous Integration

  • All unit tests/functional tests are run in the build.
  • The more automation the better.
  • Optimally, anything that builds should be shippable.

TDD

  • Write the tests before you write the code.
  • Gives you the confidence to make changes.
  • NEVER check-in broken or non-tested code.

Incremental Design

  • Design evolves with the application.
  • Designing up front accomplishes nothing.

Deployments

  • At least once-daily deployments.
  • It means nothing if your code runs locally but not in production.

How to Get Started

  • Don't do it all at once.
  • First decide on your team values. Select a few primary practices to follow.
  • Collaborate with the customer.
  • Warning, not doing enough can actually hurt your current process (take it or leave it).

Ways to Fail

  • Under communicate, stay in our silos where we're comfortable.
  • Not buildling till we know everything.
  • Constantly over-committing
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