AmsExtremeHour

KeithB asked for volunteers to help run an ExtremeHour at AMS. TimM stepped up, did and brought a couple of his colleagues along, too. Many thanks to Tim, Duncan and Tung, who all did an excellent job.

The session (held on 5 Oct 2000 at AMS's London office) went well. There were developers, project managers, salesfolk and business analysts in the group, a nice mix. Most importantly, my boss, Jeff, our CTO was there, and had some misconceptions about XP corrected.

Some people didn't turn up who had said they would, so I joined one of the two teams as a developer. I noticed while we were running the exercise that "pair drawing" was not an easy concept for my fellow developers to grasp. And in the discussion at the end, pair programming was the most contentious idea by far.

I think what impressed the folks most were the pictures of Connextra's workplace, with the cards up on the wall. That gave the whole proceedings the grounding in reality that is neccessary for new ideas to not be rejected out of hand.

Scaling also reared its head. In fact, eCustomer UK projects tend not to be so large, though AMS does run some huge projects:

Jeff: some of our projects have 700 people on them

Tim: fuck!

That's slightly misleading: AMS does run projects of that size, but I'm only putting XP forward as an option for eCustomer projects, which tend to have a dozen or so folks on them.

Before the session I had been concerned that the hour+ wouldn't be long enough for the idea of project velocity to come accross, but in fact there was no problem.

This Thursday I plan to give a fialry straight presentation on XP, with slides and such, to fill in the details.

Keith - thanks for the kind words. I should give credit to our company, ConneXtra, who allow us to do such talks on the understanding that in the XP-Community you have to both give and take on what you learn. I mention this not as an advertisement for ConneXtra - but more as an encouragement to other companies to provide a forum to share knowledge among peers. This is extremely healthy and in the long run encourages employee satisfaction and a health XP community. -- TimM