Transforming yourself, your team, or your organization to using an agile development methodology like Extreme Programming isn't easy. While some practices may simply fall into place, others can be difficult to implement due to technical, political, organizational, or personal obstacles.
Some XP practitioners have triumphed over these challenges, some are in the process of overcoming them, and others have failed on some levels and succeeded on others.
This workshop is a place where we can safely share our experiences of both success and failure in order to learn and grow. The workshop is a follow-up on the two successful workshops Experience Exchange and Experience Exchange II.
The main goal of this workshop is to share experiences with each other about doing XP and to learn from each other.
In order to achieve this goal, we will be working corporately and in small groups to examine and document typical problem/solution pairs. Possible choices for a final workshop report are a pattern collection, experience reports, or stories.
We seek submissions primarily from XP practitioners who want to share the challenges they faced when applying XP. Depending on the number of submissions, also interested XP beginners are welcome detailing their hopes and fears about XP.
Applicants are required to submit a position statement that should be no longer than one page and should describe at least one problem or problem/solution pair that the author plans to contribute to the discussion. All submissions should be in HTML and must include name, affiliation, address, and email address.
Selection will be based on clarity, originality, technical and educational merit, and, most of all, the potential relevance to other XP practitioners - the "synergy effect". The organizers will look for ideas that can be utilized by others at the workshop.
Position papers must be submitted to Frank Westphal <mailto:westphal@acm.org> via email no later than May 5, 2003. Potential participants will be notified of acceptance no later than May 12, 2003. The workshop will be limited to 20 persons.
A few position papers are available.
Instead of presenting the papers, each participant will be expected to review everyone else's paper before the workshop and complete the following two sentences for each:
We will be spending the morning and early afternoon on questions and answers about the papers. In the late afternoon, we will be playing the XP card game, XP War.
XP War is a fast-paced game that resembles the old card game, War. The game is played with either all of the solution cards or problem cards from your deck of eXtreme Programming Playing Cards. Players compete to win the highest number of solutions or problems by comparing their values.
The workshop will be held during the XP2003 conference. The format is intentionally lightly structured to leave enough space for the group to find consensus on site. Therefore, the following format is just a suggestion and subject to change:
Jutta Eckstein (www.jeckstein.com, jutta@jeckstein.com) is an independent consultant and trainer from Munich, Germany. Her know-how in agile processes is based on over ten years experience in developing object-oriented applications. She is an experienced XP coach and trainer. She worked with teams of different sizes mainly in the finance industry to help them using agile processes successfully. Besides engineering software she has been designing and teaching OT courses in industry. Having completed a course of teacher training and led many 'train the trainer' programs in industry, she focuses also on techniques which help teach OT and is a main lead in the pedagogical patterns project
Joshua Kerievsky is a software development coach and programmer. After programming on Wall Street for nearly 10 years, in 1995 he founded San Francisco Bay Area-based Industrial Logic Inc. (http://industriallogic.com), a company that specializes in Extreme Programming (XP). Since 1999, Joshua has been programming and coaching on small, large and distributed XP projects and teaching XP to people throughout the world. He regularly speaks about XP, has authored numerous XP and pattern-based articles, simulations and games, and is writing the forthcoming book, Refactoring to Patterns (http://industriallogic.com/xp/refactoring).
Frank Westphal is an independent software development coach and Extreme Programming pioneer in Germany. He has been involved in the refinement of the XP practices since 1998 and has programmed on a number of successful XP projects. He's working on a book about Test-Driven Development to be published in 2003.