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Curtis Cooley | 1 Mar 2005 01:21
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Re: Productive Friction & Toyota's "Stop the Line"


On Sun, 27 Feb 2005 20:36:49 -0000, Bill Wake <william.wake <at> gmail.com> wrote:
> When Toyota first set up their line, one of the things they did was
> run it very slowly, on one car at a time until they understood what
> was going on. Anybody done the equivalent for an XP team - implement
> only the first (small) story, having everybody either find a way to
> contribute or else sit idle? (Not work ahead on the next story.) I'm
> beginning to think that sort of start might help.
> 
We are trying it right now. I have a new job with a new startup (well,
a few year old startup) with people I have worked on XP projects
before. But when they went "off on their own" they sort of lost their
way. I guess that might be part of the reason I am here.

But to get to your question, we started our iteration today with one
story. We are really really hoping that is not our velocity, but we
want to get our hands on a story, and get r done.

We are also using the extra time to write fitnesse tests upfront
because one of their problems was not knowing when the story was done.

Slow starts are good in a long race. You never see 5000k winners
sprinting the first 100 yards :)

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Curtis Cooley
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William Wake | 1 Mar 2005 02:56
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Re: Customer relation


On Mon, 28 Feb 2005 16:06:42 -0000, Michael Dubakov <firefalcon <at> tut.by> wrote:
> I don't think this is a good idea to split user stories just because
> of the possible better estimates.

I split big stories too. In one case, we looked back and realized,
"stories estimated at more than 2 points never come in on time" so we
started splitting any stories that look bigger. It helped.

> You could split user story on tasks, estimate each task and define
> user story's effort as a sum of the tasks' effort. This may solve the
> problem.

If you're saying, "if you have trouble estimating a story, try
estimating its tasks," I'm good with that. But I wouldn't normally
split stories based on tasks - I want them to represent chunks of
functionality that users/customers can value.

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   Bill Wake  William.Wake <at> acm.org  www.xp123.com

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Ron Jeffries | 1 Mar 2005 03:11
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Re: Customer relation


On Monday, February 28, 2005, at 10:06:42 AM, Michael Dubakov wrote:

>> >I'm going to try asking the customers to split stories into smaller
>> >chunks, so as to reduce the average estimation error per story.
>>>This should help the programmers get a clue about how fast they can
>>>go. I think it'll work quite well. Perhaps they'll even deliver one
>>>good iteration this time around. I can't wait.

> I don't think this is a good idea to split user stories just because
> of the possible better estimates.
> You could split user story on tasks, estimate each task and define
> user story's effort as a sum of the tasks' effort. This may solve the
> problem. 

I'd go with smaller stories in most cases.

Ron Jeffries
www.XProgramming.com
It's easy to have a complicated idea. It's very very hard to have a simple idea.
  -- Carver Mead

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Ron Jeffries | 1 Mar 2005 03:26
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Re: XP Project Management tool recommendation?


On Monday, February 28, 2005, at 2:03:52 PM, Alexander Kon wrote:

> What do you recommend as an *XP* project management tool?

> I prefer the software be (in importance order):

> 1. With public API or Web Services
> 2. Web-Based
> 3. Open Source
> 4. With Bug-Tracker 

Please tell us more about the project. Is it co-located? Is it
starting from an empty code base? What external communication
requirements do you have? Why are you planning to have enough bugs
to need tracking?

Thanks,

Ron Jeffries
www.XProgramming.com
If not now, when?  -- The Talmud

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Kent Beck | 1 Mar 2005 05:47
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RE: Extreme Programming for English Majors


Shawn,

It seems to me like the "innards" of your routine have to have some sort of
interface, even if it isn't the final one. Even if all you do is look at
variables in a debugger, that's an interface. You can replace the debugger
with a test. Then, as you gain confidence that the algorithm works and start
to see the interface you want to present to the outside world, you can edit
the test to reflect the interface you wish you had. I do this when moving
from a constructor to a factory method, for example.

Does this address your concern?

Kent Beck
Three Rivers Institute

> -----Original Message-----
> From: M. Shawn Dillon [mailto:shawn.dillon <at> insightbb.com] 
> Sent: Friday, February 18, 2005 9:39 AM
> To: extremeprogramming <at> yahoogroups.com
> Subject: RE: [XP] Extreme Programming for English Majors
> 
> 
> I would like to do automated testing and test-first 
> development, but either
> I'm doing it wrong, or perhaps I just haven't learned how to 
> do it properly.
> I try to tackle the riskiest part of any project first (i.e., 
> the parts I'm
> not sure how to accomplish).  In practical terms, this means
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Kent Beck | 1 Mar 2005 05:47
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RE: A TDD Failure


Andrew,

Thank you for following up on this. I would like to see a test that
demonstrates the "undefined" behavior you (accidentally) expected and
another that demonstrates the behavior you got in the production
environment.

Kent Beck
Three Rivers Institute

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Andrew Wall [mailto:ajwall.geo <at> yahoo.com] 
> Sent: Saturday, February 26, 2005 11:35 AM
> To: extremeprogramming <at> yahoogroups.com
> Subject: Re: [XP] A TDD Failure
> 
> Follow-up
> 
> Thanks for the replies.
> I've not been able to reproduce the crash of the target machine in 
> the test project, although I've been able to avoid the crash on the 
> target machine now.  It was something to do with an unchecked string 
> length.  So 'undefined behaviour' is different between the two 
> compilers.
> 
> Anyway, that was just a little bump on the road of practising TDD 
> and not a hiatus.
> 
> Andrew Wall
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Kent Beck | 1 Mar 2005 05:47
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RE: Client/User must write User Story


Ask the customer to tell you a story. "Tests that use custom class loaders
will run normally," is one from JUnit 4. Clients/users typically can tell
you many many such stories, ranging from stories that are vague and huge to
stories that are trivially and tiny and everywhere in between. Take one of
these that seems like you can do it in two or three days and actually
implement it together. That will tell you both exactly how much detail you
need in a story and how big the stories should be.

The key to keeping away from technical details too early is to listen.
Reflect what they say, "I hear you saying XXX. Is that what you mean?" Don't
tell them something is impossible, too big, too small, too vague, too
detailed. Suspend judgement. Write down reminders of their stories on cards.

Kent Beck
Three Rivers Institute

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Enrique Ortuño [mailto:tecnox999 <at> gmail.com] 
> Sent: Friday, February 25, 2005 5:39 PM
> To: extremeprogramming <at> yahoogroups.com
> Subject: [XP] Client/User must write User Story
> 
> 
> 
> Foremost
> Excuse me, my english is poor (to write)
> I'm new with XP and I need know how I must to do write to my 
> clients/users his own stories. What I must to tell him?
> Maybe:
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Bill Wake | 1 Mar 2005 05:57
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XPlorations - Summary/review of "Extreme Programming Explained, 2/e"


[Crossposted to XPlorations]

I don't think the new edition of Extreme Programming Explained has 
had as much exposure as it deserves. I've summarized its key points, 
and added a bit of review.
  <http://xp123.com/xplor/xp0502/index.shtml>

And a few other reviews:
- Crystal Clear, Alistair Cockburn. Addison-Wesley, 2004.
- Office Kaizen: Transforming Office Operations into a Strategic 
Competitive Advantage, William Lareau. ASQ, 2003.
- Mapping Inner Space, 2/e, Nancy Margulies with Nusa Maal. 

  <http://xp123.com/books/index.htm>

March 1 (Tuesday) is the deadline for tutorial and workshop 
proposals for Agile 2005 (the merged conference, from the Agile 
Development Conference and XP Agile Universe). See 
<http://www.agile2005.org> for details.

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   Bill Wake  William.Wake <at> acm.org  www.xp123.com

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Dakshinamurthy Karra | 1 Mar 2005 06:10
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Productivity gains from XP


Hi,

Look at the URL:
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/index.cfm?c_id=5&ObjectID=10113120

<quote>
Engberg said since then developer numbers had declined to 150 because
of a hiring freeze, but productivity had doubled because of the
adoption of the extreme programming methodology and new development
tools.

"When people left, we didn't backfill because productivity was
increasing and we were waiting for the market to turn around," he
said.
</quote>

Thanks and Regards
KD

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-- 
Dakshinamurthy Karra
CTO, Subex Systems Ltd.(http://www.subexsystems.com)

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Sarath Kummamuru | 1 Mar 2005 08:11
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Re: XP Project Management tool recommendation?


<quote> Why are you planning to have enough bugs to need tracking? </quote>.
A wonderful question ;-) 

But any way coming back to what forms part of a XP Project management
tool. The most crucial part of Project Management and with XP
obviously is communication and from my experience i am writing some of
the tools that we have used before or think of using that server our
PM for XP purposes well. (Predominantly the communication part).

For our projects we use 

Wiki for user stories, with some status tracking capabilities, RSS
support for content update notifications to notify interested parties
about changes to user stories, comments about them, etc.

A Issue Tracker to document feature requests (associated with users
stories), change requests and link to the Version control system (CVS
or SVN).

An interface between the Version Control System and Issue Tracker with
the Wiki to update the status, version and other details to be viewed
from the project wiki.

An automate JUnit class generator which again creates links in the Wiki. 

guess it is obvious that a wiki in my opinion (and experience) forms a
core part of any XP effort to make sure that the process remains
light.
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