Gojko Adzic

During his lightning talk on the requirements trap at XP Day 08, Allan Kelly presented the results of a Bain Consulting research which looked into the effectiveness of IT, alignment with business goals and the effects of those two factors on sales and IT spending. Continue Reading »

John Rae and James Shiell presented tips and tricks for hiring the right people for an agile team yesterday during their session titled “Building a successful agile team” at XPDay 08 yesterday. Their startup grew rapidly last year, and was almost constantly hiring. The traditional hiring techniques and practices did not work for them, as they wasted too much time and effort on finding and filtering out the right people. Continue Reading »

At the XpDay 08 conference today, I participated in a workshop on pair programming organised by Matt Wynne and Laura Plonka. The participants were spit into several groups, discussing various challenges for the adoption and implementation of pair programming. I was in a group which was given a task to come up with the answer of when pair programming is appropriate. Continue Reading »

Chris Ambler, European test manager for Microsoft games, spoke about how games companies are testing software during his keynote Testing games is not a game – it’s serious stuff at XPDay 2008 today in London. Ambler said that the game industry is from a technology perspective doing much more bleeding edge than traditional industries, so it faces bigger challenges. As examples, he cited instantaneous response times for players worldwide, worldwide concurrent releases in twenty or more languages and having to get it right in first release (“what goes on disk stays on disk”). Because of that, Ambler argued that games producers face much bigger technical challenges and their QA practices have to be more advanced than in other branches of the software industry. According to Ambler, the trends and practices that he sees in this field are applicable to more traditional software markets, such as finance, and can help people produce better software. Continue Reading »

XPDay 08 started today in London. XPDay is an insiders’ conference on agile development, held yearly in London and organised by the Extreme Tuesday club. Last year, there were quite a few interesting new ideas presented so I’m really looking forward to the sessions today and tomorrow.

This year, most of the programme is decided on the spot. There are just a few planned sessions, and the rest is going to be organised in the open space format. During the first day, a lot of openspace topics are focuised on soft skills and improving agile teams, including making money by rescuing scrum teams, discussing Yagni + Wisdom, aspects of software craftsmanship, and identifying qualities of agile developers. Tomorrow’s topics are focused a lot more on practical topics such as pair programming, acceptance testing, code quality and architecture.

As at the last Alt.Net UK openspace conference, there are quite a few sessions dedicated to acceptance testing which seems to be gaining a lot of momentum in the agile development community.

I’ll be covering the conference in detail on the blog, so keep reading. All posts will be tagged with xpday08.