"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.
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.
I also enjoyed the meetup, Melinda was a great presenter and the video interviews of the development team was a great tool to capture feedback, especially with a subject like pair programming where being able to assess soft skills is valuable. In addition to the concepts they discussed, the video also provided an emotional aspect to their responses, which was refreshing compared to the typical text based survey results.
July 24, 2013
Melinda did an excellent job with this topic. It was also like homecoming for me, since I spent some time at Pivotal at the same time her team was there.
July 24, 2013
Melinda rocked! Her presentation was educational and entertaining - not many presenters get the right mix of these two elements. I was so glad I attended@
July 24, 2013
Five Stars! Melinda's presentation was excellent! -- very informative and interesting and fun. Her overview of XP (in one slide!) was priceless to me, as an XP newbie. (Thanks, Melinda!) Also the video interviews (e.g. paired programming) that Melinda inserted into her presentation were novel and insightful. XP Anthropology!
July 24, 2013
Excellent presentation, the videos of the developers nailed it. Removing the theory component with live feedback in a real scenario. Great job Melinda!
July 24, 2013
Informative. I hadn't considered the approach she took, of immersing staff into a (separate) environment where pair programming was part of the training - I think that helped speed up the training (when I implemented XP practices at Kaiser, it took significantly longer to get teams accustomed to **all** the aspects of XP practices)
July 24, 2013
My apologies, unforeseen scheduling conflict.
July 23, 2013
Not happy that I am missing this one. I get back to SF later in the evening.
July 22, 2013
Makes sense. Most case Studies on successful Scrum implementations all show that the best Teams are those implementing XP engineering practices - which is why many companies are "creating" their own methodology - Surprise! A mix of XP & Scrum -
July 17, 2013
Whoops, how did I miss that this event got moved to next Tuesday? Did Meetup let me down?
July 16, 2013
we rescheduled due to conflict with Silicon Valley ALN presentation on the same day.. just once.. next month it will be back to normal schedule, sorry for the inconvenience!
July 17, 2013
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My first ALN meetup - Melinda and the community did not disappoint. The presentation was inspiring, and so was the discussion afterwards. Thank you!