A Not So eXtreme Wednesday

Trundled along to the regular eXtreme Wednesday meeting last night, slightly late as usual! Abdel was already sitting there with his head in the purple book. For those not familiar with the book terminology used in XP circles, there is a series of books published by Addison Wesley that are the defacto standard for XP. The books are referred to not by their title, but by their colour.

It appeared that Abdel and I were the only attenders on this evening. Andy Swan had given his apologies last week, mumbling something about being in Japan. Still not sure what this had to do with him being missing, but I’m sure he’ll explain his lack of committment at next week’s meeting. Pete has now moved over to Glasgow where he is going to be starting up another XP group, all based on a suggestion I made on Scottish Developers. It is encouraging to see such enthusiasm for XP in the developer community wherever they may reside. Andy Cooke is away on a holiday which I suppose is a semi-decent excuse. As for the others, I don’t know – I can feel a Spanish Inquisition coming on!

With the lack of any mentors, with a lack of Java Swing knowledge, with a lack of XP knowledge for such situations, well all I can say is we sat and twiddled our thumbs for a few moments! What can we do? Let’s get the story cards out and have a look. Mmmm! Still no luck. All the stories for the first and second release plan are heavy GUI tasks! Perhaps this idea for a Mind Mapper isn’t such a great idea with so many newbies.

I suspect if this was a real world, commercial project, a number of us probably wouldn’t have made it onto the team. This is a common observation made by many observers of Agile methodologies! However this is a group for learning, a group for personal development, so it looks like we will survive, well for the time being.

It was during this analysis session that we were approached by a guy who had made his way over from the bar. I remember seeing him standing at the bar while I was ordering a drink: a poor soul who looked as if they had been stood-up! But no, he hadn’t been stood up! He was waiting for the geeks with laptops to appear, and only once Adbel had actually pulled it out onto the table was he able to identify the eXtreme Wednesday crowd. At last I had met Jon Mountjoy, someone I had corresponding with, via email, for the last few weeks. Great we now had an excuse reason for not doing any programming: we had to introduce Jon to the group, our structure, philosophy and what we were doing. Likewise, he introduced himself to us.

During these discussions we identified some items from our wishlist for the group and our new member was instrumental in providing information that allowed us to go do. One of the items near the top of our wish list was the creation of a Wiki, but none of us had a familiarity with any php & mySQL based framework that would happily run on a LAMP (Linux, Apache, mySQL and PHP) hosting solution. We discussed various possiblities, but Jon strongly recommended MediaWiki, which is used on such projects as WikiPedia.

The discussions went onto a generic talk on software development and more inparticularly how Agile was changing the landscape for developers. A comment was made on how Test Driven Development / Design (TDD) was the practice most commonly adopted first within organisations transitioning to XP. Now comes the quote of the week, perhaps the month, maybe the year:

“Test driven development can save your marriage!”

After the chuckles had died down, Jon was queried what he meant by this statement.

“Well with TDD you can sleep at night! You know the code you’ve just written hasn’t broken anything because your tests still pass.”

This was most interesting to Abdel, who is only three weeks away from a marriage ceremony where he will be a principle. I suspect he may well use this in future debates with his better half when she charges that he is spending too much time on the computer. I can already hear the words from him,

“But honey! I’m trying to save our marriage using TDD!”

Side note: Let’s hope that he doesn’t think that going on honeymoon is a legitimate excuse for missing eXtreme Wednesday weekly gatherings.

I wonder if Relate and other relationship counselling organisation know about TDD. Maybe I’m missing the point!

However, we all recognised the simple fact that the test had to be well constructed for such blind confidence in our coding to be taken as a given. The writing of acceptance test was considered to be easier than writing the code tests. As a developer the acceptance tests should be easier since they should be delegated to the on-site customer.

There are many XP experts who advocate the development environment should be the same on all development systems. This is something we have so far not been able to achieve since some people preference IntelliJ IDEA, some prefer Eclipse, some prefer EMACS! Jon enlightened us with his experience within a real world XP project, where developers were allowed to have different environments and tools so long as the person they were pairing with also had familiarity and knowledge of the chosen environment. Coding standards was one of the only things that wasn’t open for negotiation: a case of here is the standard, follow it or else! This is also a pet principle that Andy rants about on an almost weekly basis.

Last night didn’t see much XPing, but it did move the eXtreme Wednesday group forward:

• A Wiki has been set-up and is now running as a mechanism for collaboration and as part of the documentation for our projects. It only took minutes to get MediaWiki set-up and running on our webspace

• A decision was made to get the mailing list into use by all the members

• A very worthwhile and experienced new member was welcomed to the group

What lessons did we learn from the evening?

• XP advocates an experienced team – now we can see why

• A back-up project for such situations, one that the newbies can work on without having extensive Java experience and knowledge, would be a good idea

A good evening by any standards.