The slides for Brian Marick's keynote address, "Six Years Later: What the Agile Manifesto Left Out" are available here, with a write-up over here.
Photos from the event are available here, courtesy of Sarah Rainsberger.
Photos of the Open Space notes, flipcharts and agenda are available here, courtesy of Deb Hartmann.
We are pleased to hold this event at the CNIB Centre located north of Eglinton Avenue on Bayview Avenue. The venue will be open by 7:30 AM for you to register early with ample parking available both above and underground. Parking above ground is free for the first 75 cars.
You can reach the CNIB Centre by TTC using the Bayview bus (route 11). It's quite a walk from Eglinton Avenue, so if you're taking an Eglinton Avenue bus to Bayview, be prepare to walk 15 minutes or so north.
Brian Marick (marick@exampler.com, www.exampler.com) was a programmer, tester, and team lead in the 80s, a testing consultant in the 90s, and is an Agile consultant this decade. He was one of the authors of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development and is a past chair of the board of the Agile Alliance. He's the author of two books (The Craft of Software Testing, Everyday Scripting with Ruby) and a bunch of articles. His consulting concentrates on blending formerly-independent test teams into Agile projects, the use of executable examples (also known as tests) to drive creation of products, and helping programmers learn their craft by pairing with them—but he tends to stick his nose into everything.
Brian has named his keynote, Six Years Later: What the Agile Manifesto Left Out. The Agile Manifesto has worked rather well at changing the way software is built, but the Agile movement is now suffering from some backsliding and some backlash. I believe that's partly because the Manifesto is almost entirely focused outward: it talks, to the business, about how the development team will interact with it. What it does not talk about is how the team must interact with itself and with the code. In the early days, that didn't matter so much; the right interactions tended to happen anyway. But now it matters. In this speech, I want to talk in some detail about what got left out.
Gil Broza has been with Industrial Logic since 2004, coaching and training organizations in Industrial XP. Working with companies of virtually every size and industry, Gil prides himself on his contribution to their success in all aspects of the Agile transition life cycle and building high-performance communities. His involvement has spanned initial Readiness Assessments, project kick-offs, transitions, technical and management coaching, and cultivating internal coaches for organizational self-sufficiency. He has presented several papers and tutorials, and has been on the review boards of several Agile conferences. Gil has an M.Sc. in Computational Linguistics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel; he now lives in Toronto, where he keeps himself otherwise occupied discovering wild life—raising twins.
You may have studied XP on your own, with colleagues, or attended organized training. Maybe your team is adopting XP, or you are testing the XP waters yourself. Either way, it’s time to apply these wonderful, less than obvious practices to real-life software development: specify it, plan it, implement it. Perhaps you’re not as confident as you’d like: you know the theory, you’ve done the exercises, but something is missing. Where do you start? How will you know you got it right?
In XP: Where Do I Start?, Gil Broza will coach you in taking those first steps with some of the primary XP practices: writing stories, planning iterations, and test-driven development, on green field as well as legacy code. This interactive tutorial will raise your confidence in getting going with the process and not getting stuck, regardless of the business domain. You will see how to make valuable progress on your software project, as you get a handle on these new practices.
Brian Marick & XP Day Toronto 2007
invite you to co-create an Open Space event: What XP Projects Forget.
Open Space Technology is a way to create a conference with the energy of a productive board meeting and the fun of a good coffee break! This technique has been used around the world for over 15 years to enable spirited and productive dialogue, helping people focus on the issues they're passionate about, to discover new solutions and strategies. The meeting approach will be new for many of you, so expect some pleasant surprises!
We invite you to join us in Open Space on Saturday May 12, 2007, to help us create reminders to help us all make projects run more happily, more sustainably, and more productively.
A successful Agile team is a complicated web of... things: people, practices, tools, and so forth. Some of them are well-documented, some not. Even for those that are documented, Andrew Tannenbaum's motto applies: "People need more often to be reminded than informed." As more and more Agile teams form, the need for both reminding and informing is increasing.
By the end of this meeting we want to have:
The agenda for our conversations on the 12th will be created by your initiative, using the ideas you bring with you, about the challenges and opportunities for turning things that need to be remembered into habits. You will also be asked to take responsibility for reporting your ideas and proposals so we can share them with all participants. Your engagement will be essential to our success. You can read more about Open Space as a meeting approach here.
You are putting in significant time on a weekend so that we can improve XP culture in this city. Thus, as the Sponsors, we will make a wiki available to help you capture the results of your efforts, so that you can share it with one another, as well as colleagues who did not attend.
I'll collect the results, boil them down, make them fit together, and write them up as a collective paper that I'll publish in the Agile Alliance library (www.agilealliance.org) within two weeks of the conference. I'll refer to it from my blog, and I expect that other blogs will link to it. -- Brian Marick
Deborah Hartmann is an active proponent of Agile practices,
and is a Certified ScrumMaster
(Practitioner). Deborah has persevered in the software industry since the
early 80s, and during her extended consulting experience often thought
"there's got to be a better way!" Deborah promotes approaches like XP,
Scrum and Open Space as means to produce better ideas, teams and products. Deb
sponsored the "Growing Agile Practices" Open Space event held in
Toronto in 2004. She is the Agile Community Editor for
InfoQ.com, an online resource for the enterprise software development community.
This is her fourth appearance at XP Day North America as OpenSpace facilitator.
J. B. (Joe) Rainsberger is a programmer, coach, mentor and author. He has helped teams improve the overall value to their organizations by introducing concepts from lean manufacturing and new product development into the software development arena. His book JUnit Recipes is a manual for Java programmers to improve their programming skills through programmer testing, and has become "the bible of JUnit". Beyond helping programmers learn how to test, Joe teaches teams how to deliver working software frequently and predictably, enabling their businesses to realize revenue sooner and pursue more aggressive plans. In the true spirit of adventure, Joe is leaving Toronto behind this summer to move to Dauphin, Manitoba and live a simpler, less costly life.
Many people read the XP literature and wonder where the theory is. We forget that some people need a theoretical basis for understanding the practices of XP, a model to explain them both in isolation and as an interconnected web of mutually reinforcing activities. My Introduction to XP describes a model that attempts to explain the significance of the XP practices in concrete business terms. Eli Goldratt's formula for success in manufacturing is surprisingly appropriate for software development.
Communicating features through user stories and acceptance tests is a cornerstone practice of XP, but one that many people have difficulty starting to do. In this fishbowl, you can either watch or participate with J. B. Rainsberger and Brian Marick as they write stories and design tests for a new web application. We will give you an idea how we try to turn requirements into features that we could build, showing you not only our analysis and design process, but also an example of (we hope) effective, close collaboration. After we're done, you'll have an idea how to start doing this on your projects with your customers and programmers. At worst, you'll know what not to do.
The idea is simple: work on an XP project for a day!
But there is a twist. In case you've never seen an XP project before and aren't familiar with practices like Test-Driven Development, Automated Acceptance Testing and Planning with User Stories, our guides will help you get started.
When you walk into the Project Room, you can either dive right in or ask one of our guides to talk you through the basics of how the project works: our programming practices, our planning practices and the tools we use to make it happen.
If you are ready to get to work, first look for someone working alone, because that person needs a partner. Feel free to ask the room, "Would anyone like some help?" If everyone else is getting along, then walk up to the Story Board and sign up to work on a user story, then ask for someone's help and sit down at an empty workstation or pull our your laptop and join the network.
You'll want to know what the user story means, so ask a Customer to chat about the work that needs to be done. The Customers will be easy to identify. You can work with the Customer to design a few acceptance tests, giving you and your partner a place to start. Start coding, but don't forget to write a test first!
When you've made some progress and you're ready to share your work with the rest of the group, commit your changes, but keep an eye out for the Build Safety Indicator. If the lights go red, someone will stop the presses until the project gets back on track.
Feel free to wander in and out of the Project Room throughout the day, as well as participating in Open Space or those all-important hallway conversations that make a conference so successful. We hope you'll enjoy the experience of working on an XP team for a day!
Hosted by Green Pepper Software
XP Day Toronto 2007: May 12, 2007, 8 AM to 6:15 PM
The project room will run all day from 10 AM to 6:15 PM.