Thursday, October 14, 2004

Installing XP

Having moved on from ThoughtWorks for personal reasons, I find myself in an interesting position. My new employer SimDesk is a mixture of old-style top-down development practice and new-style agile practices struggling to get out. One of my top tasks is helping good triumph over bad in that struggle. What's highest on my task list?

Get CruiseControl running
Without continuous integration builds, it is very hard to track just where the source code base for a project stands. My boss is very excited by this, and now I'm just waiting for an official machine to run on.
Daily stand ups
Daily stand ups keep everyone in the loop, help developers get a larger picture of things and are a great leveler. Not happening yet, but I hope to get some buy in this week.
User story notecards
This is a major point against old-style waterfall. User story notecards are a very visible difference and lead to using development as part of the design process, and to short release cycles. Best news yet: my boss and his boss—who is acting on behalf of the actual customer—were fine with this. I have notecards stuck up on my wall now! And with XP-style estimates.

None of this would have been possible without the environment of ThoughtWorks. The place is like grad-school for best practices; a year there is worth four years at most other places. Now if only they had a Houston office.

UPDATE: I left out mention of the great resource, Extreme Programming Installed by Jeffries et al. And there is a bonus: a group here is alread using an internal Wiki which I immediately latched onto for posting story cards and working out design problems, plus some XP envangelizing. Plus I a co-lead agreed to start daily morning stand up meetings next week. I also find that a small satellite group in Austin is using Scrum, but I don't know that much about it. All in all a good environment to build upon.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

There's no such thing as a best practice.

Anonymous said...

Hi Brian,

If you're setting up a new XP environment, perhaps you'd like to evaluate DamageControl? Although it is not yet officially released, it is getting near a beta release.

Sample DashboardCI Feature MatrixDamageControl-0.4-alpha-144.exe

DC Runs on Linux/Solaris too of course.

You'll be up and running in minutes, and no more need to edit these pesky XML files. DC was designed with ease of use and administration in mind.

Hope you like your new job!

Cheers,
Aslak

Anonymous said...

Hmmm - your blog's preview is quite different from what actually gets posted...

There are three individual links in the one that looks like one.

Aslak

Brian Oxley said...

I'm not sure what you mean by 'preview'. Is the RSS feed only the top paragraph or some such?

Brian Oxley said...

Thanks for the tip on DamageControl, Aslak. I'll take a look at it. CC is great when it works, but it can be a real PITA to get everything working 'just so'.

Anonymous said...

By "preview" I meant "html preview of what my blog comment entry will look like". It's showing me one thing (proper line breaks for instance) and posting something else (improper line breaks - see my 3 links thatwere concatenated on one line).

aslak

Michael Dubakov said...

TargetProcess:Planning support XP style planning. It's very good and free.
http://www.targetprocess.com