XP Day {Day 2, Tuesday} (London 2005)

"fight the good fight" or "we have a dream..."

Another great day was had.

First I went to Scrum 59 Minutes by Rachel Davies and Giovanni Asproni - a great introduction. Between this and the Lego game yesterday I can see how Simon and Tulna and El Presidente have chosen some great, practical bits to put together; it really made me feel that the stuff I'd been reading up on and talking about were I work was all valid again, instead of feeling like the resistance was insurmountable.

After that it was Storytelling With FIT in the after noon by Steve Freeman and Mike Hill. They did a great lesson, from an overview, not-so-techie level, of what FIT is and how it can be excellent for acceptance testing. Unfortunately here, there is a strong division between not only all the Dev teams but QA and Support as well, so that will be a hard sell. Thankfully after some round-the-kettle discussion this morning the QA guys I know were saying "my god, it sounds like a proper process", so I think we have some buy-in :-)

I was lucky, I think, in choosing some of the best presented and informative presentations there were.

Great stuff, feeling invigorated about it all, and for a while the fight to get it here won't feel so bad knowing many other people are fighting the same good fight, and having a tougher time, if not worse...

XP Day {Day 1, Monday} (London 2005)

"One man's terrorist is another mans freedom fighter...."

Today and tomorrow I booked the annnual leave off work and paid for myself to go to the London XP Day 2005, organised by The eXtreme Tuesday Club, amongst others.

When I told work about this, they considered stumping up the cash and even time, which was a massive and pleasant surprise.

I went to the morning sessions on Moving To Agile - What Worked Well And What Didn't,
by Gavin Hope and Lindsay McEwan, and Case Study - Bootstrapping Agile by Daniel Poon.
Myself and many others were lifted by others tales of woe and hardship for fighting the good fight. Buy it can be done and we must have hope and faith and drink lots of coffee. Daniel, above, has been a pioneer for this for 5 years where he is and they're just making bits of progress - better and better all the time. Kinda puts the rest of our struggles in perspective.

The highlight of the day was Sam's The XP Lego Game. A brilliant and insightful introduction to many of the key concepts, and a wonderful refresher to those of us who made a bad move, for our sins, and are desperate to stay in the loop. I think Simon will be especially chuffed that the use of Bananas as the measure of project velocity got a mention from the man himself ;-)

Of course I had to miss all the other threads running at the conference, but the evenings work continued in what, where I work, we call "meeting room 3".... the pub.

More on that tomorrow, after going to a gig in the evening as well.... full day again....

Cruise Control, Ant and VBUnit.

"It aint pretty, but we gone and done it anyway..."

We've just got a continuous integration server set up where I work, and we have many big legacy VB6 applications that just won't go away. Your mission should you choose to accept it... is to drag this stuff into the 20th century. And I know it's now the 21st, but one step at a time huh?

http://cruisecontrol.sourceforge.net/

Cruise Control - the industry standard, I think because it 's about the only one, for Continuous Integration.

For non-java and non-.net projects, I think most of all you want to be looking at some of the original essays by the first few folks at ThoughtWorks who put it togther;

http://www.martinfowler.com/articles/continuousIntegration.html

As, of great use to us mortals who have to live in a partial non-java world, they tell you how to do it in com;

http://www.martinfowler.com/articles/ciWithCom.html

...which was the basis we (well, me, on my own one night) used to make VB6 (I know, I know, for our sins, legacy, etc etc) build from an Ant file.
Then we added in VBUnit3, and suddenly we felt a little closer to the real world.
After that worked the first time, I had to go have a lie down. Then danced round the office and made everyone come and watch... "..throw the switch egor... it's alive..."

Points mean prizes...

...if anyone can, or ever does, work out what the Average Everyday in all this references, and comments it here.
Mind you, someone would have to read this first.

More Scrumming

More resources for some great articles and info;

Methods and Tools - a newsletter/agile site that publishes free articles as PDFs.
http://www.methodsandtools.com/mt/download.html

Scrum @ ControlChaos
http://www.controlchaos.com

Scrum Alliance
http://www.scrumalliance.com/

Agile Alliance
http://www.agilealliance.com/

Scrum Education
http://www.scrumeducation.com/scrumedu

Groups

Here's some groups I recommend getiing in on - I'm just reading as much of the discussions as I can at the moment, doing the whole silent partner thing, but they are excellent and there is much to think about.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/extremeprogramming/

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/scrumdevelopment/

Scrum development

Right, it's about time to throw something useful in here when I've done nothing for ages.

Having been doing some Java revision to get back up to scratch, I could hardly pass up reading about this now could I?

Yes, I know this is a cold start, but after much delay, it's beter that the "none" I'd been doing before.

So here's the homepage;

http://www.controlchaos.com/

And as for this page which sums it up, or this one with the pdfs on it, the diagram on the former is perhaps the most useful thing I've seen in ages.