Lund Extreme Hour One

Thursday February 1st 2001 The LUCAS/SPIN-SYD XP-group met in LundSweden to do our first ExtremeHour using a format compiled from the wiki and various other sources by Daniel Karlström at LUCAS/LTH Coach was Erik Lundh. Görel Hedin also acted as a coach within in the team. About 20 people showed up. We used 6 developers, 2 customers, 2 testers, 1 tracker. The rest of the group was market. The hours was paced by a slideshow with instructions. The product was "A better mousetrap"

The developers

Two developers joined around a task and found a white piece of the whiteboard were they draw a small part of the whole mechanism solving their specific task. Then they copied the small drawing into the right part of the whiteboard were the different parts were assembled together.

Testing Since the mouse trap was built as a two dimensional drawing on a whiteboard, the testing of the mouse trap was difficult. How big was the mouse? How much did such a two dimensional mouse eat of the bait? How many real mice could fit into the bucket? There was no way to do "hard" tests on anything since the mouse capabilities was not known. It all came down to the imagination of the testers which sometimes had a different view than the developers.

Experience

The extreme hour in Lund was my first experience of extreme programming. The hour inspired me so much that I read the book Extreme Programming explained by Kent Beck. I can strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in software development. It is both easy to read and at the same time written with a practical approach to XP. It answered many of my questions and removed my doubt of the process.

The extreme hour mainly focused on the planning part in the development. To gain the most out of an extreme hour you should have insight on all parts contained in the process. I think that if you combine an extreme hour with some theoretically knowledge you will discover why you should use XP.

The part that I find most interesting with XP is how testing is integrated in the development process. This will both ensure a higher quality in the software and at the same time give the project leader an indication if the team holds the time plan. /johan.brodin@connectBlue.se

CategoryConference