Beyond Xp Workshop Questions

These are questions that came up from the XpUniverseBeyondXpWorkshop

This is from Swee Lee:

For large distributed projects:

1. the analyis process is more complex and engaging and requires dedicated skilled people. The level of dedicated attention, coupled with potentially the lack of skills of customers in area, would typically perclude the use of a programmer.

2. The 1st iteration, for a 'mid conversion' project tends to be longer than 'typical'. As the team eplores and learn an existing system. I am unsure where to strike at to balance 'early' feedback vs 'usable' code.

3. A big picture is particularly crucial to guide the metaphor or maybe more appropriately help produce "a system of Names" as Martin F calls it. This is critical to avoid potentially wasteful refactoring.

4. I am stll unsure how you would facilitate Closure for you and your customer. Who has the mandate? Argubaly you have since all the base requirements for your client have been achieved this last round. The rest is to "packagise" the system. Is this right?

5. How is knowledge going to passed on to the support team?

6. I am a littel unsure too about how you could transform a custom product into a "package" product for sale when modularity is not part of the design(since the client would not need the concept), eg how you modularise into say : Fixed Assets, Invoicing, Debtors, Lease transactions, Reporting, etc. Or has these been expected and completed at the front of the project.

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This is from Mark Kilby:

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Borders of XP (future topics of discussion; where XP is not well-defined or may not work in current incarnation)

• size of team

• complexity of project -> dependencies

• distributed teams

• legacy code

• GUIs

• components (J2EE & .NET)

Thoughtworks Team Infrastructure

• PM -> Client

• Iteration Mgr

• Release Plan Mgr

• Analysts

• Developers
  • Architect

  • Domain team - new development

  • SWAT team - bug fixes & refactorings

• QA

I'm still not clear on what Iteration and Release Plan mangers are doing. Seems to be redundant responsibilities between these roles and analysts.

this is addressed on XpUniverseBeyondXpWorkshop

What we didn't discuss...

Our typically team composition

• Deliver Director - assists with resources; usually has or locates internal domain experts

• PM - responsible for P&C, tasking, & tracking (recall we're not XP)

• Tech Lead (one or more depending on team; if more than one, then one of the leads are designated Technical Architect)

• Branding & User Experience (BUX) - usually an experience architect (EA)which is an analyst with usability background); one or more web producers to aid with layout and graphics

• Developers - usually divided into a couple of teams depending on functionality; may or may not be on-site

• QA

All the above roles have some interaction with the customer with the PM, Technical Architect, and Experience Architect having the most interaction. Domain expertise is usually with BUX and/or the tech leads.

--AmrElssamadisy (8/6/01)