Go to the registration desk to receive a program and print your name tag. If you are registering at the door, you will need to have a cheque ready. Registrations at the door carry an additional $25 fee.
In case you arrive late, the registration desk will be open all day.
They do things differently there, wherein we will speak of cultural gaps, ways to bridge them, and why that is relevant to the software industry.
After the keynote, we will make a few announcements.
Laurent Bossavit is a developer with over 20 years of coding experience, now working as an independent consultant and trainer.
An early adopter of XP in France, Laurent has translated Kent Beck's Extreme Programming Explained to French, was a coauthor of the first French book to appear on Extreme Programming, and has written a number of articles on Agile processes in both English and French. He is an organizer of the XP Day France conference.
In his training and consulting work, Laurent helps people make sense of new and foreign practices, and facilitates cooperation among groups which - in a very real sense - speak different languages.
Deb Hartmann will launch the OpenSpace sessions with an activity called (naturally) opening the space. During this activity, Deb will introduce OpenSpace and you will have an opportunity to propose sessions.
Deborah Hartmann is an active proponent of Agile practices, and is a Certified ScrumMaster (Practitioner). Deborah has persevered in the software industry since the early 80's, and during her extended consulting experience often thought "there's got to be a better way!" Deborah promotes approaches like XP, Scrum and OpenSpace as means to produce better ideas, teams and products. Deb sponsored the "Growing Agile Practices" OpenSpace event held in Toronto in 2004. She is the Agile Community Editor for InfoQ.com, an online resource for the enterprise software development community. This is her third appearance at XP Day North America, having facilitated the Toronto and DC OpenSpace events.
The idea is simple: work on an XP project for a day!
But there is a twist. In case you've never seen an XP project before and aren't familiar with practices like Test-Driven Development, Automated Acceptance Testing and Planning with User Stories, our guides will help you get started.
When you walk into the Project Room, you can either dive right in or ask one of our guides to talk you through the basics of how the project works: our programming practices, our planning practices and the tools we use to make it happen.
If you are ready to get to work, first look for someone working alone, because that person needs a partner. Feel free to ask the room, "Would anyone like some help?" If everyone else is getting along, then walk up to the Story Board and sign up to work on a user story, then ask for someone's help and sit down at an empty workstation or pull our your laptop and join the network.
You'll want to know what the user story means, so ask a Customer to chat about the work that needs to be done. The Customers will be easy to identify. You can work with the Customer to design a few acceptance tests, giving you and your partner a place to start. Start coding, but don't forget to write a test first!
When you've made some progress and you're ready to share your work with the rest of the group, commit your changes, but keep an eye out for the Build Safety Indicator. If the lights go red, someone will stop the presses until the project gets back on track.
Feel free to wander in and out of the Project Room throughout the day, as well as participating in Open Space or those all-important hallway conversations that make a conference so successful. We hope you'll enjoy the experience of working on an XP team for a day!
We will explore how the practices of XP increase a software team's throughput while reducing inventory and operating expenses. Eli Goldratt's formula for success in manufacturing is surprisingly appropriate for software development.
J. B. Rainsberger is an author, mentor, coach, programmer and columnist who cares about his colleagues and how their work affects their lives.
Open Space Technology is a way to create a conference, that has been described as having the energy of a productive board meeting coupled with the fun of a good coffee break! Organizations have used Open Space Technology successfully across Canada and around the world for over 15 years to enable spirited and productive dialogue. This approach will allow you to focus on those issues for which you have a passion to discover solutions and strategies.
We invite you to join us in Open Space on Saturday September 23rd, 2006, to help us improve the map of our industry and of the "countries" inhabited by cultures which must collaborate to produce great software: developers, testers, customers, and others yet to be named...
For more information, read this.
Deborah Hartmann is an active proponent of Agile practices, and is a Certified ScrumMaster (Practitioner). Deborah has persevered in the software industry since the early 80's, and during her extended consulting experience often thought "there's got to be a better way!" Deborah promotes approaches like XP, Scrum and OpenSpace as means to produce better ideas, teams and products. Deb sponsored the "Growing Agile Practices" OpenSpace event held in Toronto in 2004. She is the Agile Community Editor for InfoQ.com, an online resource for the enterprise software development community. This is her third appearance at XP Day North America, having facilitated the Toronto and DC OpenSpace events.
This talk highlights the core challenge of API design: balancing the needs of testing, security, and future change. Learn techniques that you can use to design APIs that don't interfere with the ability of your users to write tests for their code.
Michael Feathers works with Object Mentor. He currently provides worldwide training and mentoring in Test-Driven Development (TDD), Refactoring, OO Design, Java, C#, C++, and Extreme Programming (XP). Michael is the original author of CppUnit, a C++ port of the JUnit testing framework, and FitCpp, a C++ port of the FIT integrated-testing framework. When he isn't engaged with a team, he spends most of his work time investigating ways of altering design over time in codebases. One of the fruits of this work is his book Working Effectively with Legacy Code (Prentice Hall 2005). Michael's key passion is helping teams surmount problems in large code bases, and connect with what makes developing software fun and enriching.
At lunch you have your choice of an Indian buffet or sandwiches and salad. Food will be served in the waiting area, then you will be able to sit in room A/B, eat and meet some more conference attendees.
We will have a break from the planned content so that you can have time to look at the Project Room and Open Space, in case you hadn't done so already.
One of the classic XP antipatterns is underestimating the importance of the role of the Customer. Teams often focus on the technical practices, then wonder why at the end of three months they've built the wrong product, or there is a backlog of acceptance tests, or the planning meeting has been postponed three times. The customer is much, much more important than you think it is. Join a panel of XPerts as they comment on the matter, sharing their experience and telling stories about how teams have tried to run their projects without customers, with disengaged customers, with customer proxies, and even with customers that are enthusiastic, but thoroughly confused.
Your panelists are François Beauregard, Laurent Bosssavit, Michael Feathers, J. B. Rainsberger and Dave Rooney.
Saturday, September 23 from 8:00 AM to 6:15 PM
Registration, breakfast, keynoteOpening the spaceOpen Space and the Project Room kick offIntroduction to XPAPI Design as if Testing MattersYour customer is more important than you think...Closing the spaceThank you for attending!Saturday, September 23 after 6:15 PM
Dinner, drinks, discussion...