Evolution of the Tools and Practices of a Large Distributed Agile Team
Have you ever wanted to know which tools a big distributed team of successful software craftsman use to implement their user stories? How they configure them to support agile development based on XP and Scrum and deliver to the agreed plan? This session will answer these questions and more. Three representatives of this team will tell you what’s in their toolbox and how the toolbox supports four core agile practices that the team adopts to succeed: maximum project status visibility, effective communication, immediate feedback and ruthless automation.
Intro
Three members of a 50-strong distributed agile team will open their toolbox showing and discussing how they have been using well known free tools to support and facilitate their agile software development work.
Problem statement
Based on the experience of the presenters, the session shows how the toolbox has been evolving to include non intrusive and highly configurable tools to address problems typically present in large and distributed teams working on a complex product. Such problems include, for example, not always knowing who is doing what, lack of automation, difficulties in communication between peers.
Tools and practices
The session explores how tools like Eclipse IDE (enhanced with plug-ins), Ant, Cruise Control, ScrumWorks, Selenium and Fitnesse can be integrated and configured to be effectively used by all the stakeholders (developers, scrum masters, product owners, customers, …) in order to maximise project status visibility, receive immediate feedback and implement complete automation of as many steps of the the product development process as possible (practices put in place by the team - and supported by the tools in the toolbox - to overcome most issues described above).
Attendees will also see why these tools have been chosen, what are their pros and cons, what configuration and integration techniques have been chosen and why they work for the team.
Attending: who and why
The session is geared towards attendees with at least a minimal knowledge of concepts like Iterative development, Continuous Integration, Acceptance Testing, Iteration and Release planning (that is the basics of Scrum and XP).
Beginners will benefit as they will be exposed to a concrete example an agile team in operation using free and popular tools: they may learn of new tools or of different usages of tools they’re already adopting. Experts will benefit as they will have a chance to listen to the experience of a successful team, learn from the team’s success and failure stories and exchange experiences with the presenters; hence even if some of the described tools are not in their toolbox, they will still have the opportunity to see how the team has implemented the practices mentioned before.
At the end
Q&A will follow at the end of the presentation to conclude the session.
This session is built on the one already presented and awarded at the London XPDay 2007.
Presenters Fabrizio Cannizzo, Paul Moser, Gabriela Marcionetti
We’re presenting this session, strong of the experience at XPDay, as an experience report. This means that this will not be a short tutorial on each of the discussed tools, but rather a discussion on how we (as a team) have used such tools stressing on how to achieve best results on three important agile principles (adopted, amongst others, to overcome the problems caused by the large and distributed nature of the team): visibility of the project status, immediate feedback and complete automation.
The presentation runs for ~22 minutes, with ~6 mins for intro and conclusions, and ~4 mins for each tool discussed (mainly Eclipse IDE, Scrumworks, CruiseControl and Selenium - although we’re thinking of changing at least one of the tools). The rest of the time is for Q&A - in fact, at XPDay 2007 we also had a poster with the toolbox and Q&A and experiences exchange went on before the session and after at the poster area of the venue.
We will drive the discussion using power point slides. What we noticed at XPDay is lack of “live action” so, rather than having snapshots of the tools embedded in a slide we will show live tools in action: tools will be preloaded in background and shown when needed.
Each presenter discusses about a tool. The introduction is assigned to the presenter talking about the first tool and the conclusion to the presenter talking about the last tool.
We’re more than happy to collect feedback and change the format if necessary to accommodate any request.