Xp Immersion Two Feedback

Things that worked well

- Feeling the emotions of pair-programming: Exhausting experiences but very positive ones. Having paired with three different people for at leat 45 minutes each, I have learned a lot... about me and others! Even for a small amount of time, the other pair-work was important because it gave me a sense of what pair-programming with these people would really be like. -- JeanMarcHeneman

- Feeling the emotions of lack planning: Frustration and other [negative] emotions show that planning is important. JeanMarcHeneman

- The format. Starting from the low level bug fixing and ending with high level Release Planning and Roles within the team made the experience interesting. Each experience helped me to feel what is lacking and sometimes what could be improved. Usually the next talk/lecture/presentation showed me how to solve the problems with XP... -- JeanMarcHeneman

Things that need to be improved

- Tools for c++ teams. The good: everybody had the same tools (we can help each other pretty quickly, using the same base). The bad: the tools were almost unknown to everybody. The good: pair-programming helped to spread the little knowledge of the tools (Yet another positive experience). [Please, feel free to correct my english!] - JeanMarcHeneman

I actually really liked the fact that everybody was a newbie with the tools. I just wish we'd spent a little more time on the first day familiarizing ourselves with them. In particular, I wish exercise 0 had covered merges and collisions in CVS. --JohnBrewer

Timing. We ran out of gas before we really covered ReleasePlanning. I think that was a loss. -- PhilGoodwin

Would it be possible to add an integration machine with a merge utility to each team? That would eliminate the IntegrationToken problem. -- pg

I wish they'd fed-ex'd us the books (ExtremeProgrammingExplainedEmbraceChange and RefactoringImprovingTheDesignOfExistingCode) the week before the workshop, so people could have read them ahead of time, or at least glanced at them on the plane. Starting the workshop assuming everyone had already read the books would have let us get up to speed faster. --JohnBrewer

General comments, suggestions, etc.

- I liked the little cosmology ceremony. But sometines, it was a little bit too long.

- The change of mood on the last day was interesting - people realising that they were going home without knowing everything. No doubt the next immersion will change a few of the priorities. I think that for the second iteration this was as good as it could have been. There is something strangely satisfying about seeing a course on an iterative methodolgy converge on a solution. For myself, I got the stories I needed for the first release, and had a great time. Thanks to all there. DuncanMcGregor

I finally got around to going through the ThreeRingBinders we got at XpImmersionTwo. The last few pages appear to be a UML-style UseCase for the Sieve of Eratosthenes, for reasons I can't entirely fathom. Anyone know what this is about? --JohnBrewer

We got it on XpImmersionOne. It was the basis of a Java implementation which was refactored "live" by Kent and JimNewkirk --AndrewSwan