Extreme Interviewing: Finding the Right People for Your Agile Team
Some Extreme Programming practices — such as paired programming and open and collaborative workspaces — present challenges to the traditional hiring process as most interview candidates have trouble imagining the transition to such an environment. A traditional interview process might yield candidates who are technically competent, yet ill-prepared and perhaps even unwilling to undertake such a dramatic change to their own ideas of software development practices. This is obviously a problem.
Because the existing team needs to work very closely with new hires, using such practices as paired-programming, their participation is central to the selection effort during Extreme Interviewing.
This talk examines how one organization meets those challenges head on with a practice called “Extreme Interviewing.” During this highly interactive session attendees will attend a simulated interview and participate as both interviewers and interviewees.
The time will breakdown roughly as:
- 20 minutes for introduction and case history
- 10 minutes for exercise 1 - “interviewees” participate in an estimating session with their first partner, the two must come to a consensus on the estimate for the story cards
- 10 minutes for exercise 2 - “interviewees” get a new partner, in this exercise they must collaborate with their partner to plan a sales demo, a functional beta, and the first product release using the story cards from exercise #1
- 10 minutes for exercise 3 - “interviewees” get yet another new partner, in this exercise they work together to specify sample sets of input and their expected outputs for each of the described functions. The goal is to pick the best sample values to be used in a testing protocol to ensure good software design.
- 15 minutes for exercise 4 - “interviewers” participate in a simulated review session that evaluate the type of feedback we typically collect during the interviewing process and asks the session participants to make recommendations on next steps
- 10 minutes for participant feedback on their experience during the session
- 15 minutes for closing remarks and Q&A