XP for One at IBM

1. J. B. Rainsberger XP Toronto Users Group 2001 October 16 XP for One at IBM

2. Agenda • Environment • Project • Constraints • XP checklist • Bad experiences • Good experiences • What others think... • What I think...

3. Environment • IBM Toronto Lab, Markham • 2500 people in one building; four floors, four “fingers”; 400-meter walk from one end to the other • Individual offices; 2-meter walls; sliding whiteboard doors • Plenty of toys: foosball, ping pong, Unreal Tournament • Four “team rooms” per floor per finger, but no open development area

4. Project • WebSphere Commerce; comprehensive e-commerce solution; 600 people (>250 developers) • “Rules Infrastructure”; integration with Blaze Advisor Suite from HNC Software; 100% pure Java • Internal clients: e-marketing, discounts • External clients: personalization at LL Bean • “Structured Rules Language” with no direct unit test support • Server-side Java code for invoking and managing rules • JSP-based rules administration tool

5. Constraints • Poor customer representation • Recent “adoption” of RUP; push to “feature-driven” status reporting, but not true feature-driven development • Separate functional, system, installation and translation test organizations; often underfunded and overworked • Almost no technical mentoring; poor designs spread quickly

6. XP Checklist

7. Bad Experiences • Went from a team of five to a team of one in six months; didn't have the chance to try any of the team practices • Lack of automated acceptance tests led to recurring GUI problems • No involved customers meant an internal client had to work around my design to implement a key feature • Other parts of the system have not-so-easy-to-test design, making it tough to unit test thoroughly; slowed me down • No pair programming, which I had been looking forward to

8. Good Experiences • Worked fewer than 20 hours of overtime in six months, compared to 215 hours between 2000 August 1 and December 31 • One defect found during integration test; zero defects found by functional test organization to date • Comment from colleague: Your code is so easy to read! • Reversed general perception of the quality of my work • September 2000: ready to quit every day; now: almost enjoying the job, renewed sense of hope • Learning a new way to do things led to renewed interest in the work itself; shifted focus away from the product to the process

9. What others think... • My manager liked my planning technique; she read Planning XP and likes the idea of the Planning Game • My closest colleague is sick of hearing about refactoring; when I mention it, he rolls his eyes • I have been able to pass on some of my XP coding technique to one colleague; he has been very receptive • The top development manager: Yeah. I read about XP. Sounds good, but it doesn't scale. • Internal clients were impressed with trouble-free integration and a simple API • Release managers were annoyed by schema changes late in the game

10. What I think... • Easily the best experience I have ever had developing software • Sense of completion became addictive; frighteningly Pavlovian • Making changes any time with confidence is incredibly powerful • Satisfied with what I was able to do; disappointed not to be able to pair program • Prospects for doing XP are bleak at best...