An Extreme Hour for the January Meetup

Our first Agile Yorkshire of 2012 focused on Extreme Programming (XP), featuring An Extreme Hour. Extreme Teams Partridge, Turtle Doves, French Hens and Colly Birds of developers and customers struggled to develop paper prototypes of "The Ultimate Coffee App" for "The Lean Start-Up Mafia" against the clock.

Process-wise, we dissected XP: stripped the method down to its minimal essence. No iterations, just customers and developers planning, creating then releasing. Think elegant simplicity. A few twists were mixed in to emphasis collaboration, communication and problem-solving. Our agilists came, saw and more definitely conquered the chaos! A big thumbs up to everyone who was able to make it :-)

Thanks to Andy Longshaw for his lightning talk on "6 questions", and for introducing us to the BCS Software Practice Advancement group and the SPA conference.

This Extreme Hour was hosted by Grant Crofton and Robert Burrell Donkin.

Extreme Programming has proven to be the master of its niche, as well as a deep well of inspiration and innovation in tools, techniques and practices. Even if your teams don't do XP every day, experiencing XP helps them to grow and prepares them for those projects that would work best done the Extreme Way.

Here are all the materials you need to run An Extreme Hour based on our minimal, stripped-down human-centered variation. The timeboxing for Agile Yorkshire proved a little aggressive. Take an afternoon and allow:

• 30 minutes for "XP in 10 slides" and discussion
• 20 minutes to introduce User Stories, The Planning Game and Process Flow
• 10 minutes team building
• 20 minutes for customer brainstorming and developer introduction to paper prototyping and simple designs
• 10 minutes for a break
• 60 minutes for the Extreme Hour
• 30 minutes for the presentations
• 15 minutes for a break
• 30 minutes for discussion
• 15 minutes for a retrospective

For The Lightning Talks

XP in 10 Slides

Looks with a revisionist eye at XP after ten years. See Some Extreme Programming for a link-rich introduction to XP basics.

6 Questions

Just how agile is an environment? Andy Longshaw presents 6 questions whose answers will help you to understand how well matched to Agile a novel environment is. Information about SPA and BCS is appended.