XPDay Keynote: Rachel Davies
Posted: 29 October 2014 Filed under: 2014, keynote | Tags: courage, XP 1 CommentThis year we’ve invited co-author of “Agile Coaching” book, Rachel Davies, to give our keynote speech. Rachel has been coming along to Extreme Tuesday Club since 2000 and is a past chair of XPDay conference. She currently works at Unruly, the leading programmatic platform for social video advertising. Rachel is also organiser of Extreme Programmers London monthly meetup.
Here are a few words from Rachel to introduce the theme of her talk:- Where Did Our Bottle Go?
“Back in the day, I was in the first flurry of software developers who got excited about eXtreme Programming (XP). The practices of writing automated tests and pair programming were radical at the time. After years of being stuck in waterfall hell, we got to speak to real users and deliver code – it was a wonderful time to be a developer! Extreme Tuesday Club was a place where enthusiasts would get together in the pub to discuss how we could apply XP at work.
Fifteen years later, it seems that early burst of energy around being extreme programmers has fizzled out. Agile meetups are now full of project managers and business analysts with hardly a developer in sight. It’s becoming harder to tell that “Agile” was originally about how we approach software development. Post-agile generation developers even roll their eyes when they hear the A-word mentioned, they’ve become detached from a movement that seems to be about dragging them into more meetings and away from their beloved code.
Meanwhile the community of developers who count themselves as XP practitioners and software craftsmen has settled into a comfortable version of XP that often equates to practicing TDD under the direction of business analysts with an occasional spot of refactoring. An evening at Extreme Tuesday Club is more often like a depressing episode of the TV show “Grumpy Old Men/Women” bemoaning the state of the industry than a refreshing debate of new ideas about how we can approach software development.
Despite this apparent complacency, most organisations have an increasingly yawning gap between software developers and the business they work for. In my keynote at XPDay, I’ll be reminding you all that XP was originally about programmers working directly with customers to deliver software iteratively. Courage is a core value in XP and I’ll argue we need to revive this value and attempt to bridge this gap in our current work situations. Assuming we care about delivering value over retreating from business people to polish code, are we bold enough to stop navel gazing and try to make a difference? If so, how do we make a start?”
Technical Sessions
Posted: 13 October 2014 Filed under: 2014 Leave a commentWe want technical sessions to integrate more smoothly with the rest of the Open Space at this year’s XP Day. No more four-hour workshops in a side room, that people cannot join once they have started.
Technical sessions will take place in the same spaces as other sessions. They will have to fit in a single slot of 45 or 60 minutes (unless you can persuade enough people to invest their time in a longer session). And they will have to work with the “law of two feet”, which encourages participants to move in and out of sessions to find somewhere they can learn or contribute.
Each session space has:
- A projector or screen
- A table at which the presenter can use a laptop and power sockets
- Wifi Internet access
- Flip-chart, marker pens and post-its
The Pacman and Nyan rooms have a large table at which all participants can use laptops. The Clubhouse has a very large screen but no tables for participants. None of the rooms will have enough power sockets for all participants to plug their laptops in.
So technical sessions will have to be something different this year. But what? Perhaps a demo of a tool or technique that kicks off a discussion among the participants in the session. Perhaps exploring an idea through mob programming. Anything you can think of that works as an Open Space.
XpDay 2014. Dec 1-2. Unruly Media
Posted: 1 October 2014 Filed under: News Leave a commentWe’re please to announce that we will be holding XP Day 2014 on Dec 1-2 at Unruly Media.
Sign up here: http://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/xpday-2014-tickets-13371439335
This year, we’re returning to our roots with a scaled back event. It’s still about being an exchange for practitioners to trade experience.
We have a new venue and slightly different format based on Open Space. We will start with a kick-off session at 18:30 on Monday evening to get to know each other and build an initial programme. The main Open Space session starts on Tuesday at 09:30. Finally, we will move on to our regular eXtreme Tuesday Club at the Bishop’s Finger from around 18:30.
XP Day is the annual event of the eXtreme Tuesday Club (XTC) which still meets regularly on Tuesday nights. Sign up for XTC on the wiki if you can, or just turn up.