Presenting XP - our XP

I just held my fourth presentation of XP this month. The first was on the startup meeting, the second with the team, the third was for the customer and today it was for the entire tech department of Creuna Sweden.

The first occation was alot about selling the idea to the company. That presentation was based on the article What is XP by Ron Jefferies along with a couple of slides I added about why this was good for us, both in this project and in the long run. On the rest of the presentations I have just had one slide, One Page XP by Bill Wake, and talked freely about XP from upper left to lower right, adding things as I pass the different stages.

The second occation was to get the team started, trying to figure our the roles and responsibilities among us. What are the Interaction Designer, the Test Leader and the Project Manager supposed to do? We've decided on having the Interaction Designed being in charge of the user stories, and coordinating them with the customer. Along with the Test Leader she then writes proposed Acceptance Tests for each story. The Test Leader is then in charge of implementing the Automated Acceptance Test using Selenium and also doing the manual testing where Selenium can't be used. The Project Manager mainly do XP while playing The Planning Game and keeping the Overall Schedule. Other than that she keeps track of how we're doing with time and estimates and arrange everything around to let the rest of the team focus on producing - she's somewhat like a Scrum Master.

The third was more of a introduction where we wanted the customer to know what to expect and to get to know how much the customer wanted to be involved. We got the customer to agree on sitting one day every week at our office, and also got to know that more involvment in the story creation was wanted. We settled for a process where Angelina will produce the stories and then walk the customer through them in a separate meeting before we plan. It's a solution we all think will work really good.

This last one was more educational to let everyone else at the company know what XP is, what it can do for us and what pros and cons we've found so far. About half of the group knew briefly what XP is on before hand, but only a few had more than shallow knowledge. The most discussion was when I came to the Design Philosophy box in the lower left where we talked about Good Design versus Simple Design. I stated that all Design Principles still are valid and that Simple Design just states that you shouldn't make your design "future proof". An example that came up was that you might not want to use a Factory for creating objects if you only can see need for one implementation, which I agreed to but added that you'd anyway would make that class implement an Interface that others use to access it - making it easy to add a Factory later on if needed while it isn't adding code that isn't needed. I found it peculiar that no discussion at all was raised around Pair Programming - except our thought about how to deal with new developers added to the team.