Taking Agile to the Next Level: The impacts and benefits of introducing XP

"XP practices can drive tremendous value for a business, and address some of the tough issues that organizations chronically face when developing world class software solutions.

• It typically increases software quality

• Team velocity increases

• Knowledge transfer is significantly enhanced and ""bus count"" goes way up

• Resources can move more easily between teams with minimal impact on productivity

However, XP incorporates some challenges for teams that you might not anticipate:
• Some aspects of XP are readily embraced by almost all developers - such as test driven development, and fewer meetings.

• Other parts of XP are more controversial. Particularly where pair programming is concerned.

Our initial intention at our organization was to spread XP across all of our development teams, but it soon became apparent that doing so may never be possible. In fact, even keeping XP going in one team can take a lot of commitment and careful strategy.

In this talk, I will discuss the challenges of XP introduction, with particular emphasis on pair programming - the most complex and problematic XP practice for most organizations to adopt.

I will share theory and best practices around the issues involved, and describe some strategies for how to mitigate the impact of the change on your teams.

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Speakers Bio:

Melinda Stelzer is the Uber Scrum Mistress at Snapfish.com. She has been a scrum master, agile practitioner and agile coach since 2009. Her conference speaking experiences include the presentation of a session on rolling out enterprise wide web accessibility at the 2005 CSUN conference, http://www.csun.edu/cod/conf/2005/proceedings/2566.htm and “Distributed Agile in the Enterprise” at San Francisco ALN and Agile 2012.