More XP-rience
Video: https://youtu.be/DoFrzbpECCY
Thu, August 25, 4:00pm – 4:30pm
First Name: Niall
Last Name: Ross
Email Address: nross@cincom.com
Title: More XP-rience
Type: Talk
Abstract: In the 15 years since I last presented my 'XP-rience' of
eXtreme Programming to ESUG, I've had a lot more experience: of
working in partly and wholly not-colocated teams; of how I and others
actually think while doing XP; of the disadvantages and positive
advantages of non-colocation; of what is most used and most needed in
tools. This talk will let you (and me) discover if I've learned
anything in the last decade and a half.
Bio: Niall ended his undergraduate career with two intellectual
interests: computing and the theory of relativity. A quick check of
how much commercial work was available to relativity and gravitation
theorists made him decide to do academic research in that field and
then seek a commercial job in computing, rather than the other way
round. Niall started working commercially in IT in 1985. At first, he
was assigned to designing and implementing software engineering
process improvements; only after three years did he begin significant
writing and delivery of commercial software. This experience taught
him that intelligent people can form foolish ideas about software
engineering if they have not worked at the coding coalface of real,
large commercial projects.
Learning from this, Niall spent the nineties working on software to
manage complex, rapidly changing telecoms networks. A side effect of
this work was that it taught him much about how scale and rate of
change affects software. Early in the nineties, he discovered
Smalltalk. The more he used it the more he came to recognize its power
in this area. This perception was strengthened when he spent a year
delivering a telecoms management system in Java.
At the end of the decade, Niall formed his own software company to
offer consultancy in meta-data system design, Smalltalk and agile
methods. Over the next decade, he worked on a variety of
meta-data-driven systems, mostly in the financial domain.
Niall joined the Cincom Smalltalk Engineering Team nearly eight years
ago. His first task was to lead the team that does the weekly
VisualWorks builds - an experience he likened to doing brain surgery
on yourself every Friday (e.g., "Prepare new memory for insertion,
remove old memory … uh, I can't remember what I was going to do
next!").
Currently, he leads the Glorp and Database team. He also leads the
Custom Refactoring open-source project, which he co-founded, and the
SUnit open-source project.
1. More XP-rience:
What more have I learned
about eXtreme Programming
in the last 15 years?
By Niall Ross, Cincom Systems
@cincomsmalltalk (Twitter)
#ESUG16
2. The core of eXtreme Programming
• Test-driven development
• Refactoring
• Pair-programming
• Tools
• Psychology
(which I will now talk about in reverse order)
11. Humans are not that good at it
• Smalltalk pushes the boundary of what
you can do
• Fight the problem, not the language
• eXtreme Programming does the same
• Make it run (wrong!)
• Make it right (less wrong!)
• Make it fast (er)
I get by with a little help from my friends
• pair-program – as much as you can (bear)
ESUG 2016.11
Programming is not that easy
@cincomsmalltalk #esug16
