Portland Xp Users Group Notes

Eighteen people had lunch together on May 23, 2008, at the McMenamins? on NE Broadway. Discussion ranged over many topics. Six or seven people were new to XPDX, the rest were the usual suspects. :-) I had fun and learned stuff. DianaLarsen

Notes from the monthly PortlandXpUsersGroup

XpCodeSprintRetrospective: XpCodeSprint, LineOfSightChess, SetupForCodeSprint

Planning meeting

DianaLarsen, ArloBelshee, RebeccaWirfsBrock, RikSmoody and PatrickLogan met over lunch at McMenamin's at Cedar Hills Crossing to discuss the future of XPDX. After several tangents and much pleasurable conversation, various members of the group agreed to the following actions:

Speaker Recruitment:

Rebecca will contact Ward Cunningham & Bjorn Freeman-Benson, Alan Shalloway (NetObjectives), Ron Jeffries, and Brian Marick

Diana will contact Mike Cohn and William Wake (for July or September speakers)

Arlo will contact Joshua Kerievsky

Rebecca recruited Diana to speak in August after the book is published

We'll all ask our speakers to include optimum interactivity in their presentations; we like hands-on meetings

Code Sprint:

Arlo will coordinate with the Portland Ruby UG to arrange a code sprint for late April or early May

Agile Open Space Conference NW:

Targeted for a 2-day gathering in late january or early February, 2007

Diana and Rebecca will take the lead in getting sponsorship from the Agile Alliance

Patrick will contact Intel as a potential sponsor

Arlo will help to coordinate with PADNUG as a potential sponsor

Someone (ooops! I didn't write this one down) will contact Eclipse as a potential sponsor

Diana will create an initial budget

We will develop a theme that focuses on drawing out topics about practical experiences of XP and other Agile methods

When the time comes, Rik will help set up a webpage/wiki for the conference

"Agile Development in the Portland Area"

The goal of this meeting was to set an PortlandXpUsersGroupAgenda for 2005. We had about 17 attendees, good discussion, and good pizza complements of http://cubiccompass.com

Courage is more than just no fear. It starts with a dedication to "no fear", but develops into much more. Put simply, Courage is the desire for change. People naturally fear change; when the team has Courage, it seeks change out.

So, how do you get there? How do you bypass human nature and make change not only the normal way of things, but something that everyone on the team continually seeks out?

I will present a number of techniques that worked well for our team, and discuss why they did. The specific optimal techniques will vary from team to team, but the underlying objectives will remain. Hopefully, I can also give you a little taste of the state of true courage - and the difference between courage and fearlessness.

Software Engineering is a commodity skill and today's Engineers must become Software Craftsman to maintain a competitive edge, or become a casualty of the outsourcing trend.

This presentation will answer the following questions:

JimShore of Titanium I.T. spoke on continual design under unenviable conditions. Somehow, RikSmoody and Novell failed to make the connection, and we did not have use of the room. The cleaning staff persisted in vacuuming the hallway near where we gathered.

XP's emphasis on TestDrivenDevelopment, MercilessRefactoring, and SimpleDesign come together as "ContinualDesign?" (aka EvolutionaryDesign). What is continual design? How does it work? What about architecture? How does it really work when it comes to hard problems in the real world? JimShore has been experimenting with continual design on many projects since 2000. He discussed his experience and the surprising results he's had.

2003.7.1 Several people who attended a recent Agile Developer's conference shared stories. They include Ward Cunningham, Rebecca Wirfs-Brock & Diana Larsen.

'''Embracing change: Games and Reflections - Diana Larsen (http://www.futureworksconsulting.com) -- January 28, 2003

Diana brought sets of eXtreme Programming Playing Cards contributed by Joshua Kerievsky, Industrial Logic, and the group played several XP learning games: eXPplanations, Value Squares and Pair Draw. Diana gave out four decks of the cards as door prizes. Photos of the lively play are available at these links:

http://xpdx.org/photos/Larsen/XPDX1.JPG

http://xpdx.org/photos/Larsen/XPDX2.JPG

http://xpdx.org/photos/Larsen/XPDX3.JPG

http://xpdx.org/photos/Larsen/XPDX4.JPG

In addition, Diana gave out copies of an article she wrote for Cutter IT Journal February 2003 issue, "Embracing Change: A Retrospective" and we all discussed ways in which change has been accomplished in our organizations.

XP: Back To Basics -- MichaelLeach -- December 3, 2002

Mike discussed what it is about XP that is "Extreme" and gave a high level description of the XP rules principles found at http://extremeprogramming.org/rules.html. Real world user stories and task cards from CubicCompass software were shared.

Framework for Integrated Test -- Ward Cunningham -- October 1, 2002

Ward continues creating new, helpful bits. He talked about getting clients/customers to write acceptance tests by saving a Word table as html, then processing it into automated tests.

Details of the talk are on the Wiki: http://fit.c2.com/wiki.cgi?WhatAndHowTalk

XP Down Under -- Ken Dickey

Ken described how he ran an xp project in Australia. Here are his slides in StarOffice/OpenOffice format:

Implementing XP in a Corporate I.T. Shop -- August 7th, 2001

Here are the PowerPoint slides from my presentation: http://xpdx.org/files/ImplementingXP.zip

-- AlexGinos

After Alex's presentation, JimLittle and WardCunningham shared their thoughts on XpUniverseTwoThousandOne. Jim described KayJohansonsXpUniverseExperienceReport, ComplexityAsDebt, and XpForCapitalists. Ward mentioned the discussions of XP inclusion/exclusion and Kent's "etudes" speech: PracticesVersusEtudes.

Pair-programming and Spike -- June 6th, 2001

We wrote this much of the twenty-four game.

Planning and Feedback - May 1st, 2001

Facilitated by MichaelLeach, WardCunningham, and JimLittle

Thanks again to our sponsors Novell and Logical e-Business Solutions who provided the meeting space and food!

This XPDX meeting focused on the PlanningGame. MichaelLeach provided a high level introduction of how the game is played and the group briefly discussed the concept of planning and how it is currently defined within their organization.

The PlanningGame was then enacted in a 30-45 minute demonstration with WardCunningham and JimLittle playing the roles of Development and MichaelLeach acting in the Business role. The premise of the game was based on a Business customer trying to develop an online version of the board game Monopoly with the assistance of an XP development team. MonopolyUserStories were presented, estimated, split/combined, re-estimated, prioritized, and negotiated for a 3 week 1st iteration.

Following the demonstration, the group split into smaller groups of 4 and conducted a hands on planning exercise for iteration 2 using pre-printed story cards (thanks Jim!). One group member was elected to represent Business while the other 3 represented Development. XP Coaches floated around the room and offered assistance. This exercise lasted about 45-60 minutes. Here is one team at work ...

During the exercise, participants were encouraged to write their questions down on PostIt notes for later discussion. JimLittle then organized and addressed the questions while sharing his wealth of experience using XP on a demanding Internet project.

The evening concluded with the distribution of a PlanningGame epilogue authored by AlexGinos which highlights moves that take place beyond the PlanningGame.

Presentation slides and documents available at http://www.cubiccompass.com/public/xp/ .

UnitTests and ContinuousIntegration - March 6th, 2001

Facilitated by AlexGinos and BrianKnowles

Eats provided by CSG Professionals. Digs provided by Novell, Inc. Thanks sponsors!

Thanks to everyone who came to the second XPDX meeting on March 6th. We had a good turn out again and a very interesting meeting.

AlexGinos kicked off the meeting with a brief overview of what UnitTests are and how to use them in ExtremeProgramming. This lead into a very fruitful discussion (it lasted for two hours!) of UnitTesting tools, techniques, gotchas and how to do ContinuousIntegration. MartinFowler was present and shared his perspective and experiences with these topics. He mentioned ThoughtWorks' experiences with a BuildMonkey? that facilitates automated ContinuousIntegration. More details on their experiences can be had via Martin's ContinuousIntegration article. [http://www.martinfowler.com/articles/continuousIntegration.html]

He also mentioned a testing technique they use called the ObjectMother to centralize object creation for use in complex UnitTests. The idea is to centrally locate the creation and management of objects that UnitTests depend upon. This keeps test startup code in one place and also improves performance by avoiding too much object churn.

Mention was made of a few other tools:

Finally, BrianKnowles gave a demonstration of work he has done to automate UnitTesting in a JavaTwoEnterpriseEdition application. He first gave an overview of how JtwoeeUnit works and how to use it to test code accessed by JavaServlets. Then he went over how JakartaAnt works and how to use it to assemble and test your J2EE applications. Finally, in an impressive show of skill and grace, he demonstrated JakartaAnt automatically assembling a J2EE application, deploying it, starting JakartaTomcat?, and running all defined unit tests within the application (both plain JUnit tests and J2EEUnit tests).

Inaugural Meeting - February 8, 2001

Introduction

AlexGinos provided an overview and introduction to the purpose of the group. This group exists to provide:

Distinguished Speaker -� WardCunningham

WardCunningham then gave a short presentation on the past, present and future of ExtremeProgramming and what he�s up to now.

ExtremeProgramming grew out of Ward�s work at Tektronix, building real products with SmallTalk and ObjectOriented principles, early on in OO's adoption. After being asked what he was up to every day, Ward began to structure his development so his answer could end "...for the customer". To do this, he started asking himself these questions before any undertaking.

"What am I doing?"

"Why am I doing it?"

"Whom am I doing it for?"

"What�s next?"

With this customer focus, OO�s ability to simplify ReFactoring code and successful experiments with PairProgramming, the kernel of XP was assembled. Then, about five years ago, KentBeck "turned up the knobs to ten" on a troubled project at Chrysler, successfully putting XP through the paces on a significant project.

XP is now known as a LightWeightMethodology?, however, Ward does not believe that�s a good categorization. He�d rather have people understand that XP is focused more on the final deliverable than on producing project management artifacts. Ward asked the group to list off light-weight methodologies and the following were mentioned:

It was even proposed that there should be a UnifiedLightweightMethodology :-)

Three XP books have now been published and there are more on the way (if not here already). "The publishers have figured out that thin methodology books sell."

Ward then listed off recent or upcoming conferences that will deal with XP: The XP buzz in the industry is building. As a show of hands displayed, few people are following all of its tenets yet, but many are interested in learning how it can help deliver better customer results.

Currently, Ward is focusing his attention on better defining the business role of XP. Traditional business processes are handed down from big business and don't fit entrepreneurial startups well. Since XP is a good risk control tool and there is an absolute focus on outcomes (liquidity in the business world), the start-up environment appears to be a good fit. He has taken an academic interest, collaborating with a successful local entrepreneur in applying XP principles at a new start-up company. His goal is to define a unified XP-like process for startups.

Activity

A "get to know ya" game was played to introduce everyone to each other. The goal was to meet as many people as possible in fifteen minutes and find something personal in common. Some attendees can really network!

Business

Prof. AndrewBlack will be teaching an XP course at the OregonGraduateInstitute this spring. He would be grateful if any XP'ers would be willing to be guest speakers, provide tips, or even be an on-site customer for a stretch. Contact Prof. Black at black@cse.ogi.edu if you are interested.

What should this brand-new group be called? After a few nominations, a nearly unanimous decision for XpDx? was rendered. This acronym nearly rivals GNU on the recursion scale. Aaron Singmaster-Judd from the TechnoLoft? swiftly snapped up xpdx.org on Friday. Stay tuned, well let everyone know when there's a site. Thanks Aaron!

The question of what format following meetings should take was posed to the group. Here's a list of suggestions:

It was decided that the meeting should be held once a month and avoid conflicts with other industry groups in the area. Also, finding a permanent venue was discussed with multiple sites being proposed. A schedule and meeting location will be announced shortly.

Resources

There is information regarding the PortlandXpUsersGroup available at the Portland Pattern Repository Wiki: PortlandXpUsersGroup

Also, subscribe to the XPPortland mailing list at: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/xpportland

Thanks to everyone who came, unofficially we had 52 people attend! Thanks to WardCunningham for his insight. Thanks to Ace Communications for the great facility. Thanks to Logical e-Business Solutions for the pizza and soda.

CategoryGroup CategoryXpUsersGroup

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