XPDay 2010 Registration

I'm a PhD student at the Open University. So far, I attended this conference once and presented parts of my research at XP2010 this year. My research focus is on agile software development, in particular on pair programming. I'm interested in how pair programming works in industrial settings. I would like to attend the XP Days because it is a great opportunity to talk to agile practioners and to share and discuss findings from my research.

I attended XTC last month and found it really interesting. It was good to talk to like minded people with similar challenges. I manage a group of developers and have been using adhoc 'agile' style practices, albeit without realising they were 'agile'. I'm keen to learn further how to balance business demands whilst maintaining an efficient (and happy) development team - also to share experiences with the community.

This will be my first experience of XP Day so I'm approaching this with an open mind. I?m hopeful this event will allow me to further my knowledge with respect to SDLC trends, share ideas with like minded people and contribute where I can. I?m particularly fascinated with the views and impressions the latest processes have on business people. It?s always useful to gain perspective from a different angle, especially from a view point which must to be practical compared to idealistic.

I am prepared to share my experience with Real Options, Kanban and Feature Injection (Agile Business Analysis). My current interest is in gathering experience on how people deal with people, especially in difficult situations. How do people deal with People, Relationships and Groups?

I also enjoy drawing comic books on Agile and related topics.

I've done a bit of conference attending and @extremetuesday - talking to like minded people, sharing ideas, getting stuck in and seeing if I can help and be helped. I try to keep my knowledge and ideas current, and not fall into the trap of 'going native'. I have been coaching for a good few years now, and have been independent coach for the last four years. These get togethers are the best way of doing that. Plus, I love meeting new people, particularly over a pint. I'm a python hacker, so always on the look out for other python hackers - coaching Python teams in a small bright company would be my panacea.

 1) Acceptance Test-Driven Development Collaboration: I'm working on a proof of concept for a new acceptance test-driven development framework. I want to talk to lots of people that have real-life experience with acceptance test-driven development, example-driven development and behaviour driven development. I want to gauge what people are really doing, how it's going and what needs to be done better. 

2) XP Development Toolchain for iOS/Cocoa/OS X: I've had some limited success implementing TDD/ATDD and CI with cocoa on iOS but would like to collaborate with other developers to find the missing pieces of the puzzle and to find better ways of doing it.

I would be honoured to attend. I don't have any fancy new ideas about agile or xp or software development to peddle. I have a couple of coaching techniques I find very effective which Chris Matts has urged me to share. I would also like to attend to offer a service to any attendees just starting out on their agile journey - a specially designed coding dojo offering simple technical deliberate practice in a social setting - CyberDojo.

 I'm interested in the people side of software development, including how to smooth team and organisational transition into a more agile way of doing things. I'll be looking to talk about new practices, and new ways of using old practices, with a particular interest in ways to engage the non-software side of the business more in the software life-cycle; and share some war stories on coaching teams. I'll probably propose a session in the open space, maybe on agile environments.

Having worked with Agile practises over the last few years at BSkyB we have adapted many of the techniques to suit our product and business. We are now looking to adopt a Kanban approach and interested to see how others have made the change and see what impacts it has had. Also willing to share some of our techniques and experiences, and how we keep the team motivated and energised.  

I've attended several XP Days in the past but also skipped them, in part because I wasn't sure whether it was an expert or beginner conference.  So I'm glad to see this experiment.

Why me?  Well there are two trends I'd like to understand more and contribute to. 

1) The debate in the Agile community is evolving into a debate on learning, which makes me happy.  I think I can contribute here and learn from others.

2) As Agile grows up the technical practices are being pushed to the background, but these are essential for working Agile.  I'd like to discuss this.

I'd like to learn and share what makes great teams and great code. Why can 3 people locked in a room get more done in a small space of time than a bigger company with more resources despite all the dedicated specialist teams, management, and a pile of money?(from my experience in a small company in NZ) And why is code quality still poor? What can we do to write code which ages well, can still be adapted easy years after it was first released? Why in ages past could people sail around the world, lead armies over mountains, get to the poles without a computer or spreadsheet in sight (or objectives, timesheets, flow charts...), yet companies with all these now still can't release quality software in a timely manner with the features that users want? 

I'm mainly a Java Dev with over 10 years experience (hoping it's not the same year 10x over), written a few internal frameworks (Ajax before Ajax was a term, deployment tools, test frameworks) and always am amazed at the amount of effort being expended with little visible progress. Seemed to have performed Agile before Agile was a known term. Haven't been on an XP day before, love to go and participate!

Given I was introduced to XP by Karl Scotland  back in 2001
  And I've been using Agile Methods since then, most recently Scrum to deliver projects for Deutsche Telekom
  And now at http://www.youview.com Kanban to model and enable a value chain from product definition, through development, integration, test and deployment. 
When the opportunity to come to XPDay arises
Then I'd like to be considered in order to learn from and share our experience with other people in these areas. 

We're also using Gherkin with http://www.lettuce.it/ to automate testing of D-Bus APIs so be great to connect with anyone else who digs that stuff.

Having worked in agile teams for the last five years, I'm interested in discussing how teams remain agile over time. How do agile teams need to change their approach to adapt to an expanding codebase and stagnant business processes? How to stop long running teams losing the motivation to 'embrace change'?

Would also enjoy discussing how to manage the divide between customers and project managers who use waterfall processes for budgeting & planning and agile development teams.

 I'd appreciate the opportunity to attend. I am a Product Manager for Yahoo! based in the UK but have also worked in a start up over the last 6 years growing from 30 employees to 300+. We transitioned to Scrum 2 years ago which was a painful process. Id like to hear more about the Product Management side of things in Scrum and how we can get better at adding value to the teams we work with.

I'm interested in the technical side of things.  I see so many teams who adopt an agile PM approach fall flat because of their technical inability to keep up with required rate of change.  Basic XP technical practices are adopted only in name. How can we improve that side of things?

But more than that, I want to explore: what comes beyond the XP practices?  With XP we've delivered a continual, reliable flow of features into production and a cycle time of a few hours from idea to production.  How can we reduce that further?

I'm interested in supporting legacy teams and products transition to agile development processes.

My current focus is (still) adoption of agile practices by a mature C++ team/product. I'm particularly keen to discuss

• TDD - the relationship between it's adoption and design documentation
• development metrics -the selection and use of appropriate metrics
• self-organisation - how to encourage/empower/enable the team to move beyond command & control

I would like to present on our experiences in moving from a chaotic environment in a company with less than 5 developers to a more formal agile process as the company expands, and discuss what has worked and what has not.

Also, most agile processes seem to focus on the code.  Real-world projects also tend to incorporate databases and user interfaces, often developed by people with different mentalities to developers. I would like to discuss how these people work with agile projects in different types of industry.

I've attended the last two XPDays, and went away with important lessons and new ideas to try. I attend to share my experiences, and offer mine to others. This year I'm interested in the experiences of other Lead Deveopers and those who guide agile teams daily.

From a process point of view, I'm particularly interested in talking to people who have participated in agile teams going through periods of change: growth, shrinkage, changes of ownership, staff turn over etc. How did your techniques change, how did you manage your relationship with decision makers in the business, how do you find a common process in a team where opinions differ? 

I'm always interested in learning about new technologies people are trying, languages, test technologies etc. I'm trying to adopt a more ATDD style but often find it hard, technically and personally. I'd like to hear how others manage.

My interest in attending XP day is in two parts. Number one, I would like to find out how other practitioners are working on agile software development projects and compare notes. At the present time, I am interested in how automated acceptance testing works on other projects - how test suites are used and maintained (or not..) over time, TDD in the real world (including the 'to mock or not' debate) and how you grow your software iteratively.

Number two is to discuss the seemingly mandatory adoption of tools and practices that I have seen teams get preoccupied with in the process of 'agile adoption' - is that the best way to start? Does it lead to teams resigning themselves to 'agile doesn't work' too early - or worse getting stuck in just another process a bit like the one they had before?

I'm a fairly frequent attendee of XTC. This would be my first XPDay and I would love to spend two whole days meeting, discussing and learning from the community. I want to have passionate discussions about any topic from XP to Systems Thinking. I will also try to share my recent experiences with Kanban.

Royal Academician and world class Baccarat player Anthony Green is pledged to foil Gojko Adzic in his latest plans for world conquest. Fortunately this can usually be accomplished by throwing the combatant off balance with probing questions. I will also be (ab)using the event to solicit voluteers for my learning lunch talks at the BBC. You have been warned.

We have been introducing agile techniques to our current development process and would like to talk to other practitioners to share experiences and techniques.  Most projects I'm involved with at the moment have mostly distributed team members which adds its own complexities and would love to find out how others deal with this.  All in all, I would like to further my knowledge of XP/agile/lean practices with people having real world experience.  I would like to find out more about topics including kanban and pairing but what is really interesting me at the moment is TDD, test automation and coding dojo's.  This would be my first XP Day event.

Having been to and given many talks at Agile conferences, I often  find that often the most interesting things happen in the open spaces. So i'm very keen to see how this experiment works out. 

Currently i'm curious to explore the idea of how individual competence affects performance within a team. Do highly driven individuals manage to produce better, or worse teams. I suspect that the best teams are when you have a collection of "rock stars" who have also spent time working on how to work as a team. 

I'm also keen to explore the idea that optimising just for good software development can sub-optimise an entire business, and how can we think about this holistically, in order to have great software teams be a core element of a successful welding certification business. 

I attended XPDay last year, and I gained a great deal from the experience, bringing back a load of new ideas to my employers. I also think I managed to contribute a fair bit - I was heavily involved in the Open Space discussions on UX & Agile (which is something I spend a lot of my day job worrying about) and Database Refactoring (again, another area of expertise), and I really enjoyed 9and asked lots of questions at) the 7Didigtal experience report.

This year I'd like to come back, attend more Open Space sessions and maybe talk about my experiences over the last year, implementing a Scrum-based (Scrum-but...) methodology on a Gov't project, while also trying to drive the functionality to suit the UX designers I work with. A particular interest Continuous Deployment as applied to large-scale systems, so anything I can participate in around that theme would be brilliant!

I'm finding that many software projects fail to deliver value for reasons beyond the internal control of the development team. However good the team is at writing code, writing stories, TDD, BDD, XP, Kanban etc, the software doesn't work for the business. Can this just be put down to poor business analysis (delivered the wrong thing) and poor technical analysis (couldn't integrate with the key finance system)? Or are there bigger organisational factors at play? I'm not sure I have any answers, but I'm looking forwards to the opportunity to stimulate the conversation. Oh, and let's throw in an obligatory Systems Thinking reference.

I'm also very interested to hear experiences of people who have made ultralightweight processes work in their organisations. How did you get away with not providing the business with time and cost estimates? Can you really convince people that bugs not worth fixing today aren't worth writing down in a bug tracker.

Although I've followed the XP Days for a while now this will be my first opportunity to attend. I work for Moneysupermarket.com as an Iteration Manager and have been proactive in the adoption of various Agile approaches over the past two years (RUP, Scrum, Elements of XP and now moving into KanBan). There have been many lessons learned over this period and I look forward to the opportunity to provide feedback on our findings to a greater community so more can learn from our mistakes.

With our move to KanBan I'm hoping to gain insight into the potential pitfalls of this approach and how best to position ourselves for success. In particular I'll be interested in discussing estimation/sizing, wastage, story breakdowns, etc relating to larger projects as previously I've only mapped KanBan to smaller change requests and incidents.

This will be a unique opportunity to work closely with other experienced practitioners and I?m confident that I can bring value to this open space event. This is especially true as I also have a technical heavy background and as such can also provide insight into some of the lower level problems we?ve encountered, such as architecture, software, etc during our bumpy but highly enjoyable and successful journey.

I am a developer at a small company where I have started to manage client projects. We have spent many years developing without Agile and it has always worked for us, however, I am keen to learn and discuss ways in which new and old techniques can be harnessed to make our lives easier and more efficent.

I have been lead towards Agile, Kanban and XPDay by Chris Matts and I hope to bring as much as I can into my project management to better current and future projects.

I am a business analyst in a company [moneysupermarket.com] which began moving from waterfall to agile about two years ago. It wasn't until we got Thoughtworks in to help us, about a year ago, that we really got it, introducing pair programming, TDD, automated acceptance testing and continuous integration. I'm looking forward to sharing my experiences with others who have been through the transition and challenges.

We are looking to introduce Kanban soon, so I am really eager to learn as much as possible from people with that experience. It has been used with great success by the first team to try it, and now we want the project teams to adopt it. I'd also be interested in meeting fellow BA's to discuss working in an agile company, and share notes about things that have worked, or maybe gone wrong. For instance, BDD has really worked for us on previous projects, but hasn't fitted our current one.

I have been using Agile and XP as a developer and tech lead for the last two years at Moneysupermarket.com, and I was also fortunate enough to work closely with Thoughtworks in order to hone my Agile skills further. During our Agile journey we have used RUP and the IBM Rational toolset, and gained a great amount of experience and understanding in transitioning an organisation from the waterfall methodology to Agile and XP.

We have been focussing on and had success in the core Agile development concepts such as TDD, Pair Programming, Automated Testing and Continuous Integration, and I would love to share the good work we have done in these areas with the community. I would also like us to get better at Agile design, coding standards, ensuring we work at a sustainable pace and improved stakeholder management, and would relish the chance to meet practitioners who have had experience in overcoming these problems. Also, as part of our continuous improvements process, we are trialling Kanban in our team, so any advice and shared experiences in this area would be a massive help.

I believe that the key to producing quality software consistently is to continuously improve and review what you do, so the opportunity to attend this XPDay and exchange ideas with my peers in the Agile community would be fantastic.

This will be my first XPDay. I am a developer who has been using Agile methodologies for about 3 years in a few different companies. Currently, In our development team we are using agile methodologies, nevertheless we are not following any of them religiously, we pick up some of the characteristics we think they are better for our set of different projects. We mostly enjoy XP, TDD and retrospectives.

I would like to meet other developers to discuss and contrast what methodologies they are using and which results they are getting by using them. In our team we are always open to try/adopt new things to make our performance and daily job better, therefore XPDay is a good opportunity to get some new fresh ideas and present to them.

Over the past year I have introduced Kanban to my place of work, we now have three Kanban teams. One came from Scrum, the second was a brand new team and the third practised a non-timeboxed incremental/iterative approach but did not attempt to consciously  limit work in progress. I'm interested to hear of others' adoption experiences as well as sharing my own story.

Additionally, I'm especially keen to share and learn on the following topics

• Continuous Deployment
• Lean approaches to bug tracking
• Bottom up agile/lean adoption
• Agile team dynamics

In the last few organisations I've worked in I've steered those teams towards a more agile way. Beck's book resonated with me when I read it all those years back and I hold the XP values as central tenents in my dev process. I'm a brand new Scrumaster looking for ideas. I did my own flavour of Kanban where I last worked and I'm involved in driving BDD/ATDD to my current place. Also I'm doing an Msc thesis about using BDD to help with re-writing systems and finally I'm the name sake of the other John Nolan.

I've not been to an XPday in a few years. This is partly because I have transitioned from a team of several developers "doing" XP, through a series of redundancies, to a team of one person. Doing XP. It's interesting to see how far the technical and organisational disciplines will actually "scale down" to a team of one!

It's time I came back to XPday to learn, to share, and to be enthused.

I am a software developer, a columnist (for ACCU's C Vu magazine), author of the book Code Craft, and a curry eater. I spoke in the software craftsmanship track at QCon London this year.

I would love to talk about my experience with noSQL databases, Mongo, Hadoop, HBase and on how at Forward we reached an higher level of agility living without a schema. 

I would also like to talk about our very lightweight implementation of Agile (almost no process), how we work, which practises we gave up and which practises we leveraged. 

That's the first time I'll be in London for the XPDay! I believe it's a great chance to talk to other developers about what techniques are helping us deliver better software, as well as the mistakes we are making along the way.

Lately I'm particularly interested in Continuous Deployment and infrastructure automation and see these as natural steps for people comfortable with Continuous Integration. Having organised Coding Dojos in the past, I'd be interested to run a session where instead of solving a coding challenge, the main goal is to build a Walking Skeleton for a fictitious project.

Another topics I'd be interested to see (and hopefully interact with others) are ATDD, recruiting/team culture and lightweight processes. I really liked the hands-on approaches from the SPA and SoftwareCraftsmanship2010, so I hope to see more of that at the XPDay.

Software developer who lost his passion for coding until this guy turns up and tells us to talk to each other face to face, expose work been done so everyone can see, continuously build, integrate and test code, enjoy failure how else to you meant to learn and be brave. The passion came back and even though I get stuff done my directness and honesty makes certain types of people uncomfortable. I would like to spend some time with people who have similar ideas and problems.

I'm a software developer who has over the past few years learned a lot about agility within many environments along with lean principles that can be applied to the software development process and I have been a passionately advocated the adoption of these principles and processes within my organisation. My team have worked both in a scrum process and we are now experimenting with Kanban and both approaches have resulted in some success and failure.

I would be very interested in discussing with people how we can use BDD and DDD as tools for building Acceptance Tests that are useful and understandable for the users, the testers and the developers.

I live in India, have about 26 year of experience in the IT industry, and been using agile methodologies for the last eight years. I play various roles as required: developer, architect, business analyst, project manager, agile coach, and trainer. Been conducting training programs on agile (XP + Scrum) for about six years.

I would like to discuss about architecture and design evolution, borrowing from my experiences and listening to others about their experiences in this regard.

I would also like to learn from others about continuous integration, integrated test automation, kanban, etc.

I have been a speaker in Scrum Gathering Chicago 2008, Scrum Gathering Orlando 2010, Agile India Conference Banglore 2006, Agile India Conference Chennai 2007, Agile India Conference Mumbai 2010.

My interest and experience is in using Agile methods in the international development context. I'm especially interested in the commonality between Agile and participatory best practices from international development like Participatory Action Research. I do think that Agile methods mitigate risk and make good software. However there is, I think, an even more interesting aspect to Agile - almost a "rights based" approach. In my view the world would be a better and fairer place if people had influence over decisions that affect them. Consequently I see participation not simply as a tool but as an end in itself. Agile is intrinsically more participatory. I want to discuss a way of approaching Agile that is not focussed on delivery as its main success criteria but on participation and the access it can give people to have influence over decisions that affect them.

I am also interested in discussing Agile applied at the small scale (organisations of 5 - 10 people, project 2 - 6 weeks, multiple simultaneous projects).

Since Open Volcano was the best event I attended this year, I was excited to see XP Day was to follow the same format.

I'm a Business Analyst and have been working in Agile teams for a little over two years. My current team have made a lot of changes to our process over the last few months, introducing concepts from Lean/Kanban into our workflow. I'd love the opportunity to share some of the things that have worked and get feedback on some of the changes we're looking at making next.

As an analyst I am also particularly interested in how we make decisions, both at the project level and at the portfolio level using measurements like cost of delay, cost benefit ratio, cycle time etc to inform decision making.

I would like to come to XPDay to cause trouble and generally make a nuisance of myself

I'm interested in how people have adapted current known Agile methodologies to improve development and delivery yet still being able to improve on project planning.  I've worked on formal and informal XP projects over the years and have learnt many different approaches to those in "Agile text books" and happy to share in my findings with anyone willing to listen.  I am open minded and would welcome ways to help me and my collegues do things better.  Still, never managed to make to to an XTC event yet!

I'm a huge advocate of XP, and have cofounded the group XP Manchester which meets once a month, and has continued to grow since inception. I worked at Codeweavers Ltd, where I was involved in a huge shift towards an agile way of working where XP was a massive part of the success of this. I have opinions on all aspects of XP - I can can be found expressing them to anyone who will listen. I'd love to attend so I can share ideas and experience, and learn about others ideas/experience of XP. This would be a great thing to take back to XP Manchester, and continue the spread of knowledge.

I'm the CTO of a financial software company in London, youDevise Ltd. (see the youDevise blog). We use agile methods throughout our 30-person technology organisation. I led a session at a previous XP Day on resistance to agile methods entitled "Why Aren't They Typing?" At the 2010 event, I'd be happy to talk about root-cause analyses, Hudson plugins, or any other topic I'm supposed to know about. Also, at this year's event we hope to launch a new version of Narrative, our open-source framework for building behaviour-driven tests in fluent Java.

I'm the Development manager of a financial software company in London, youDevise Ltd.(see the youDevise blog). We use agile methods throughout our 30-person technology organisation. I'm keen to share our experiences of agile and hear about the lessons learnt by others on their path to agile adoption. In particular, I am interested to discuss the current ideas on how best to scale development teams and solve the problems of distributed teams. I last attended XP day in 2007 which was totally awesome - I learnt a great deal from the event and came back to my employees with loads of new ideas, so looking forward to this one.

I've been applying agile techniques for about ten years with varying degrees of success. It seems to be easy with small motivated teams working on green field projects. More recently I've been working on retrofitting agile techniques to existing "legacy Java" projects with a more mixed and dispersed team. I expected this to be harder, but it's actually much much harder and I'm keen to engage in discussions about why this.

I'm also keen to talk about my recent experiences of trying to make acceptance testing more "real" by running a VMWare virtual machine that looks just like my production server, and deploying my production binary to it. This seems like a great idea but there are some entertaining technical difficulties that arise.

I've been coaching agile teams for a while now and am interested in 2 key areas:

1. Becoming a better coach; I'm interested in coaching patterns and techniques that support individual and team learning.

2. Helping business stakeholders turn the benefits we believe that agile brings into competitive advantage.

I'm keen to share ideas and understand the latest trends in the agile community about the following topics:

• Product Portfolio management 
  • Information radiators 
  • Online planning and scheduling
  • Online visualisation e.g. Story maps/trees
  • Dependencies 
• Practical experiences with Lean, Kanban, Scrumban etc

I'm interested in how individuals get better at the skills that help them become more valuable members of high-performing teams. I'm also interested in how developers become more than human compilers blindly consuming requirements from a work queue and start to contribute to the definition of the products we build.

I'm interested in sharing what little I've learned about TDD in multi-threaded environments, TDD in distributed systems and TDD on App Engine. I'm also interested in sharing my experiences with trying toa pply XP principles to open source software development.

I'm a regular, though not terribly frequent, denizen of XTC. My main passion is in making it easier to test web apps using modern browsers, and to this end I'm working on Selenium 2 and WebDriver. We make extensive use of TDD on the WebDriver project. I've been working at Google as a Software Engineer in Test for the past 3 years, and before that was at ThoughtWorks.

We have been working on a number of areas of Agile and I wanted to share and discuss some of the ideas that we have been working on. Specifically we have been exploring how to extend pair programming into a shared development environment, going beyond Continuous Integration to living in an always integrated state, what is the minimum and the optimum that you need of Agile Technical practises to be really agile and effective. Some of these things have come out of our work on Wolf Pack Programming&trade.

I enjoy being part of amazing conversations and I am passionate about the Agile community.

I am the facilitator of this XPDays OpenSpace. This means I have a set of responsibilities during the event to ensure that all you amazing people have the right conditions to self organise and emerge awesome learning.

Mostly I will be a Bee, sometimes I will be a Butterfly.

This community is entirely new to me. I am an aspiring graphic facilitator/recorder and will be helping the XPDays event create a visual record of the event. I'm excited about the possibilities of this event. 

I love learning and sharing from the XP community.

I am have been using XP practices since late 1999 and never looked back since. I am now a days a proponent of the Software Craftsmanship movement, living and working using this state of mind.

I would love to share experiences of having a a company with a strong focus on learning and customer satisfaction as well as learning from other practitioners.

In Open Spaces I like to be a Butterfly, fluttering around and catching information here and there, but I can (will) also be a Bee. :)

I have never been to an XP event and would love to know more about this. I have experience in running many agile projects and due to my passion of improving the development cycle I am always looking at broadening my knowledge as well as sharing my experiences and thoughts on lean practices.

I am passionate about improving the way we deliver software AND what we deliver. Main focus: Engaging the User, Lean, Persona Driven Development, UX, NJMs

I've been interested in Refactoring and what was then called 'light weight methods' since around 1996, when I got the 'interesting' task to remove some bugs from a 'newly' developed piece of code. After removing 90% of the code, it was still doing the same thing, minus some of the defects. That got me thinking 'there must be a better way'. I'm still thinking that... Some things I learnt (or re-learnt) since xp days 2009 I put on here Willem van den Ende I'm too much in the middle of most of this to submit an experience report at the moment. I might be able to come up with something between now and XP Days.