Last night was the October 2010 meeting of XP-Manchester, a local group set up by me and Jim McDonald. As always the meeting consisted of two halves, the first being a workshop (this time led by me) and the second being a coding dojo.
For the workshop this month I ran a version of James Shore’s Offing the Offsite Customer game, as described by Kane Mar and using Kane’s drawings as the requirements. I hadn’t run the session before, and it turned out really well. We had 19 participants, so we split into two roughly equal-sized teams, with each team further split equally between a group of Product Owners and a group of Developers.
In the first run-through neither team managed to create a diagram that looked anything like the requirement; whereas in the second attempt both teams produced very good diagrams, and well inside the allotted time. The difference was born in the team retrospectives between the two runs. Both teams independently decided to work much more iteratively and interactively second time around, and it paid off. It could be said that in the first run, the teams focussed on perfecting the written spec, whereas in the second run the teams focussed on perfecting the working diagram. This focus on evolving a diagram using direct feedback was “invented” independently by both teams, and towards the end of the second run they even had free time available for fine-grained polishing.
The second part of the evening was a dojo. Jim introduced us to the Minisculus challenge set by Eden Development at the recent Software Craftsmanship 2010 event. Jim decided we should attempt the Mark I problem in Ruby, and due to the relative lack of Ruby knowledge in the room last night this meant that Mike Josephson did most of the driving. We didn’t get very far, but we did have some very interesting discussions about TDD style: After you’ve faked a return value to get quickly to GREEN, what’s the best step to take next? Is it better to add another test in order to triangulate towards a more general solution, or is it better to treat the fake return value as duplication and fix that by moving specifics up into the test? We explored the latter approach last night, and no doubt we’ll continue the debate next month.
Many thanks to Jim and Mike for running things, and to everyone else for joining in!
XP-Manchester happens after work on the second Thursday of every month at Madlab in Manchester’s Northern Quarter. Everyone is welcome, and if you want to come along you can get details of upcoming meetings by joining the mailing list at http://groups.google.com/group/xp-manchester.
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