SimonRoberts

I'm a consultant specialising in helping my clients to find better ways to develop software systems.

Typcially, my assignments involve tailoring a standard software development process (mostly Scrum/XP) to meet the needs of a client, training and mentoring the team and managing the client's project until they are able to be self-sufficient.

My current assignment involves establishing the business case for an XP based process and presenting/selling it to the client's board. The work has been particularly interesting because it has involved extending XP to solve such challenges as:

• Two teams in two different locations, working on different parts of the system.
• Multiple product managers who together take on the on-site customer role.
• Managing scope and requirements coverage.
• An agile project within a non-agile programme.

Over the last few years I've become increasingly interested in the relationship between various aspects of personality and how comfortable people are with an agile approach. For example, there seems to be quite good correlation between people's MBTI and how well they cope with agility.

I don't find a lot of time for real development these days, but when I did, I was strong on:

• Object modelling
• CORBA
• Java including J2EE
• Smalltalk
• WebObjects

I'm based in Berlin, Germany but work with clients throughout Northern Europe. .

Well in terms of the MBTI (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator), strong Js (judging) are, in my experience, likely to be very unhappy with the late closure and uncertainty that XP requires. Ps (perceiving) on the other hand, are much more comfortable with XP (they are comfortable moving into action without a plan and planning on-the-go). I used to be very sceptical about MBTI (and other psychometric tests) but it seems to fit so well in a lot of cases. Of course, there are exceptions (I have read that Kent is an ENTJ) and we all have coping strategies for operating in our non-preferred modes. A team composed of purely strong Ps would present its own problems - they would tend to avoid making any sort of commitment.

Simon