Summary for Event Guide

A high-performing agile team is tight knit. They have worked hard to become a cohesive unit and have developed a bond. This chemistry can be thrown off balance when someone is added to the team in the middle of a project. It does not matter how flexible, capable, or agile savvy the new team member is. If they have not been involved in the care and nurturing of the team’s culture and is not invested in the same way that the other team members are. When the new team member is not flexible, capable or agile savvy, the effect can be devastating.

In 2001, Follett Software Company (FSC) began work on the next generation of its library software. Many options were considered, including sending the effort off shore. In April 2001, members of the Destiny team attended a C-SPIN meeting where Martin Fowler spoke about Extreme Programming (XP). In what was considered a bold experiment at the time, the team chose to adopt an XP process “the most well-known and controversial” of the new agile processes.

This experience report will tell of a “do-it-yourself” Agile success story, with changes, challenges and lessons learned along the way.

As Agile practitioners, a great deal of our time is focused on having targeted, directed impact. But sometimes we miss opportunities to repurpose our efforts into syngergistic, many-pronged effects. Not multi-tasking — multi-EFFECTing, from one piece of effort. This talk will explore this topic, both in theory and in practice. We will examine a particular client case-study, where two disparate 6-person developer teams, with minimal pairing and TDD experience, were developed into highly-productive “gelled” teams, through “Group Pair Programming” — 6 individuals, 1 workstation.