XP for One at IBM

1
XP for One at IBM

• J. B. Rainsberger
• XP Toronto Users Group
• 2001 October 16

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...