I might be working with a team on a buisness workflow automation project, since it is a business workflow we are looking to have constant interaction with stakeholders and frequent releases. The team however, is pretty new and the average experience is around 3 years. Do you think the lack of experience could be a problem if the project ...
I am using FogBugz as a tool to give us "a look into the future". The program takes our work hours, the tasks for a release, assigned developer's estimate against that task, and the developers tendency to under/over estimate, and tries to come up with a probability of making the release against a range of dates in the future. Now since ...
Reading the XP book, I have a condtradiction in my mind that I cant address and am wondering if you guys can help. XP says write stories on index cards, assign those to a developer, have her estimate how long the task would take and then use pair programming to do the coding bit. So then her and the developer she pairs with must choose...
How does a team of say 50 work on an XP project? I would assume that the project would need to be divided in to multiple modules before all these people can start working on anything.. but this may be against XP practices (BUFD) Also if many people start implementing user stories at the same time, won't there be duplication (same class...
I work in an Extreme Programming team, pair programming every day. Recently more and more often I get to do stuff that gives slow feedback, on order of 3 minutes. For example: change some thing, recompile, run and see wheather the performance is improved. I see it coroding the quality of pair programming, and I think it affects pairs mor...
Our company has been thinking about scrapping our interview procedures and bringing each candidate in for a 4-5 hours sit-down with some of the programmers and just do some pair programming. I like the idea in theory but I am not sure how you can really make it fair for each candidate. How would you rate them? Wouldn't their input real...
Background: I am a product manager for a medium size web hosting company and we offer a variety of complementary services besides just webhosting. Today our company has about a dozen 3-6 developer teams each working on different facets of webhosting (i.e. DNS registration, shared hosting, cloud computing, dedicated servers, resales, e...
I am monitoring a competition where each sprint is scheduled to one hour interval. Each team member should have a count down c'lock on the screen, preferrably on terminal. The c'locks should lauch alarm after 45 minutes, 55 minutes and and 60 minutes. The enviroment should create a feeling of extreme programming. Is there some ready te...
I'm in the requirements/design phase of building an application. We're using VS 2008 and TFS. I have a bunch of scenarios, and related tasks. Some of the requirements have changed, and I would like to go through and see which tasks need to be changed/deleted. It's very difficult to view the overview of the system using any of the exi...
In pair programming, the experience of every member of the team can be spread to new member. This experience is always in sync with the code, because the "senior" of the pair knows how the code works and what the design is. So what is the utility of design documentation in this case ? UPDATE I don't imply no design, I imply no documen...
Is there a good freeware / open-source tool to manage user stories in terms of capturing and tracking stories that are currently being developed? ...
We follow Scrum for software development in our organization. Although we have fair experience with Scrum, we stop short of producing good source code at the end of the day. People are talking about combining Extreme Programming (XP) with Scrum to produce predictable results. I have gone through the Extreme Programming materials but co...
I am on a team where i am trying to convince my teammates to adopt TDD (as i have seen it work in my previous team and the setup is similar). Also, my personal belief is that, at least in the beginning, it really helps if both TDD and Pair Programming are done in conjunction. That way, two inexperienced (in TDD) developers can help each ...
The Mythical Man-Month is now classic, but the "Surgical Team" methodology is still interesting. What methodology most closely resembles it or has the same essence? To summarize the Surgical Team analogy: A surgeon understands the problem/business domain and is the expert. They are the authority when there are questions or conflict ...
When designing a back-end system, what granularity do you normally give your stories and tasks? Most examples of creating stories and tasks usually center around a GUI application with the story being something the user can do (e.g. search for a book by the ISBN) and each task centered around enabling this GUI feature. When designing...
I have been practicing TDD and (some) XP for a few years now and have found that it solves many of the problems I had in my career previous to it's adoption. By removing so many headaches, my love of coding has been rejuvenated. The problem is I have also found it difficult to find .NET (my current stack) projects utilizing these pract...
I've recently been looking at Extreme Programming and wondering if it would be realistic to implement it where I work. My question is, if you're pitching to a potential new client and you tell them that you're using XP, and you explain what their responsibilities are as the customer, are they likely to be put off selecting your company ...
In his book Extreme Programming Applied, Ken Auer casually mentions an Enabler pattern. Kent Beck also mentions it (at the very least in an email dated November 08, 2004), but I haven't been able to find any details in the usual places (Google, the wiki at c2.com, etc.) Where can I find out more? ...
We have a system that has some bash scripts running besides Java code. Since we are trying to "Test Everything That Could Possibly Break" and those bash scripts may break, we want to test them. The problem is it is hard to test the scripts. Is there a way or a best practice to test bash scripts? Or should we quit using bash scripts and...
A group of us are starting a new project and are working in a distributed fashion. Our intention is to use agile development methodologies and in particular Extreme Programming (XP). This is intended as a learning experience, but while some of us have experience with XP in a "traditional" team none of us has experience doing XP with a re...