Xp Universe Beyond Xp Workshop

At XP Universe several of us met at a workshop to discuss projects that we were working on, or were planning to work on that didn't necessarily fit into ‘pure XP’ projects - hence 'Beyond XP' as the title. (Actually it is 'XP Beyond The Limits' but the wiki pages name was getting really long) This was a very informal session with and here are my notes:

Now, to refresh our memories, we are discussing ‘Beyond XP’ , or basically what happens when we try to implement XP practices in situations that are not pure vanilla small team, onsite customer, and everything else ‘just right’. We as a group tried to pool our experiences and come out with a set of issues that need to be addressed in many of our projects. Greg and I tried to give our personal experience with the Atlas project at ThoughtWorks, Inc. and much of what we discussed were specific ways in how we do things at TW. Other issues were brought up since it was mainly a free form discussion, much of which really remains unanswered. (I have a way of being windy with my introductions, so without further ado – the outline!)

The specific boundary conditions in XP that we as a group have crossed or will need to cross in the near future are as follows:

• Lack of on-site customer and replacement with a surrogate customer who is usually a business analyst.

• Size of team

• Distributed teams

• Switching mid-stream to XP and legacy code that is untested.

• QA and their role in XP

• Merging teams, with an initially successful and proven XP team and another classic development team.

• Thoughtworks – specific ideas/roles such as iteration and release plan managers, SWAT team, and iteration planning meetings.

Those are basically the very broad points. We really did not ‘agree’ on any particular solution among us, but really gave our own experiences.

So… Back to the subject, questions:

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

Release plan manager was responsible for working directly with the customer/analysts to determine what the cards are, the proper scope of each card, and when they need to be played. Iteration manager was responsible for organizing IPM, getting the card estimates, figuring out (with the Release Plan Manager) which ones will be done in the iteration, and then tracking the progress of the work on the cards and delivering the results. In sum: Release Plan Manager generated the cards, fed them to Iteration manager, and he got them developed and delivered. Even though both managers did a lot of the same things during the first several iterations, they tended to specialize in these two areas later in the process. This need not be the case, but the tasks need to be done, whether the same person does the same ones each time or not. The important thing is to recognize that the tasks are there. How many and which people do the tasks are separate questions. For us, keeping the release plan up to date really turned into a full time job for Release Plan Manager.

Here are links to the full set of questions submitted: BeyondXpWorkshopQuestions --AmrElssamadisy (8/6/01)