A recent topic of discussion in the XP2E yahoo group got me thinking a little bit about the progress our team has made in adopting XP, some of the issues we're encountering and where we're going.
We've read the XP2E book as a team and are following on with the XP Installed book. The XP2E book helped us with a lot of the theory and we started down the road together. With the Installed book we're picking up some more "how to do it" material.
- We've physically opened up our area and are enjoying the improved communication.
- We're pairing up most of the time. We notice when we don't (more errors and slower).
- We're holding each other accountable to standards.
- We are still building our TDD, program by intention skills.
- We are getting a lot more user involvement, but not co-located.
- We are having few (near zero) minor defects found in production.
- We're still getting a handle on stories and points.
- We're working out issues with testing and data bound controls.
- We're having problems with integration - we need to install a CI server.
- We're looking to swap out VSS for SubVersion.
- We are going to work on picking up design patterns soon.
And as always, how do I test this object that is generated by the ORM tool and expects to see a database on the back end?
This week we moved 3 releases (different projects) to production. All of them sailed through testing with no defects. We have 1 more system pending release and 2 more in testing. Overall, a pretty good feeling.
The weekly planning and keeping focus on those goals is an extremely important thing for our team. The morning stand up helps us to keep our focus.
