Come  to  this  session    if  you  have  an  interest  in  hearing  about  current  state  of  XP  and  how  it's  been  evolving.  This  is  a  case  study  of  XP  prac=ces  at  Connextra  and  then  later  at  Unruly  Media  (founded  by  people  who  worked  at  Connextra).  

 

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Extreme  Programming  Explained  -­‐  Kent  Beck  (Addison  Wesley  2000)  hMp://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ExtremeProgrammingRoadmap  

 

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Prac=ces  from  “XP  Explained”  in  1999  ed  1.  

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XP  Circles  of  Life  as  described  by  Ron  Jeffries  at  XP2001.  

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XP  Explained  2nd  ed.  

Knobs  to  11  

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Connextra  history  

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At  Connextra,  wethought  the  template  would  make  a  neat  XPDay  give-­‐away.  We  were  surprised  that  this  format  spread  around  the  world.    

TimMackinnon  was  co-­‐author  of  Endo-­‐tes=ng:  Unit  Tes=ng  with  Mock  Objects  paper  and  developers  at  Connextra  were  first  to  use  them  from  2000  before  Mocking  frameworks  had  been  developed.  

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Another  less  widely  known  Connextra  prac=ce  was  Lone  Ranger.  A  nominated  developer  who  was  available  on  a  daily  basis  to  handle  customer  support  requests  (nomina=ng  interrup=ble  developer  to  minimise  interrup=ons  to  all  teams).  All  developers  took  turns  to  be  LR.  Ref:  Extreme  Support  by  Rachel  Davies  &  Colville  Wemyss    

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Gold  Cards  –  every  developer  had  1  day  per  week  to  work  on  research  of  new  ideas  or  improvements.  Ref:  Innova=on  and  Sustainability  with  Gold  Cards.  XPUniverse  2001  

 

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Unruly  is  a  video  technology  company  that  works  with  top  brands  and  their  agencies  to  predict  the  emo=onal  impact  of  their  videos  and  get  them  watched,  tracked  and  shared  across  paid,  owned  and  earned  media.    Sarah  “XP  is  integral  to  our  whole  business  ethos  and  company  philosophy.  It's  important  that  all  teams  -­‐  whether  that's  marke=ng,  ops,  design  or  media  -­‐  are  comfortable  with  con=nuous  itera=on  and  happy  to  "embrace  change"  as  the  XP  moMo  goes!”      

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Some  photo’s  of  team  at  Unruly.  

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We pair on production code, everyday (except Gold Cards). Often I see people working in triples.

We use traditional index cards within team area and electronic card walls to radiate progress to customers across EMEA and US offices.

Stan on Infra and Mike on UX

We formed a cross-team Borat squad to move forward our infrastructure vision. Developers already deploy code and maintain infrastructure but this is about “reducing variance, improving the mean” We used a gradient to see who was interested to be on this squad.

We did dot-voting to prioritise areas for our Infrastructure backlog.

Helps break down tensions between teams and is fun during the day

Vikki made this for our larger team retrospective before we split into smaller teams.

Distributed team. We try to involve Aimy one of our Product Managers in New York. You can see her here on Google Hangour with her face plastered with sticky notes and wearing a tiara from (Google Hangout effect)

Knobs  to  11.  Are  we  s=ll  looking  for  areas  where  can  we  improve?  Yes!  

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Iteration length was 18 working days, seems a long time (compared to 2 week sprints) but actually we release code daily, this is about agreeing priorities with our stakeholders. However, 18 days makes the day of the meeting move about in our stakeholder calendars – we’re trying 15 days (every 3 weeks) with 2 teams and other team is on 10day cycle.

When  I  joined  the  company  there  was  a  huge  and  growing  backlog  of  wordy  stories  in  TargetProcess.  This  cumula=ve  flow  chart  shows  that  we  were  inves=ng  =me  wri=ng  these  when  they  were  not  gemng  done.  Now  moved  to  a  simpler  tool,  Trello,  which  is  more  like  a  card  wall  and  less  effort  to  maintain.  

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Were  we  spending  too  much  =me  in  detailed  es=mate  sessions,  talking  about  stories  that  never  got  implemented.  We  have  reduced  whole  team  =me  doing  this  and  can  give  ballpark  es=mate  with  1  or  2  developers.  Whole  team  only  has  detailed  design  discussion  for  stories  that  are  definitely  chosen  for  our  next  itera=on  (discussion  happens  aper  planning).  

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We  had    established  a  Product  team  to  work  with  stakeholders  to  figure  out  new  stories.  But  they  ended  up  wri=ng  long  stories  that  were  too  big  to  get  implemented.  

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We  moved  our  Product  Managers  down  to  sit  with  the  team.  

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We  merged  Product  and  Development  to  create  cross-­‐func=onal  teams.  Developers  involved  in  story  crea=on  and  gives  ballpark  at  same  =me.  

Detailed  discussion  with  team  only  happens  for  most  valuable  stories.  

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Now  stakeholders  talk  directly  to  Developers.  

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We  created  a  hot  ideas  process  where  Developers  are  the  first  point  of  contact  and  lead  story  discussions.  

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We  created  a  visual  map  of  our  users  to  make  it  easer  for  people  to  have  conversa=ons  with  them.  

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Your  ques=ons?  

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