Jul
03

Back from XP2005

It’s more than a week since I’ve come back from XP2005 and I’ve just about recuperated. That’s the sign of a good conference: exhausting but rewarding.

Hubert Baumeister has a great series of pictures of the conference

I co-hosted 3 sessions:

Fortunately, there was some time left to attend two great workshops:

  • The Coder’s Dojo workshop by Laurent Bossavit and Emmanuel Gaillot. In this workshop we explored two ideas that the Paris XP group have been experimenting with for the past half year:
    • Coding Kata: a programming task is given and prepared for the next session. During the session, the programmer presents how they arrived at the solution, starting from scratch. The presentation must obey the following rules:
      1. It must be performed in the given time
      2. The programming task must be solved
      3. Everyone in the audience must be able to understand all steps taken
    • Randori: each participant in turn makes the code pass a failing test and then writes a failing test for the next participant. That was a lot of fun! We learned a lot about taking small steps and TDD when the process stalled because we were trying to take too big a step.
  • The Agile Contracts by Mary and Tom Poppendieck where we presented and discussed ways of writing contracts that promote cooperation and work well with Agile software development principles.

There were lots of other interesting workshops I wanted to attend, but unfortunately one can only be in one place at one time… More on those later.

Some interesting keynotes by Jutta Eckstein, Kent Beck and especially John Favaro. More on those later

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