Posted by In my previous post, I shared with you how Philippe and I prepared for our talk “Extreme Practices.” In this post, I will be briefing the talk’s content; starting with the pitch and ending with the feedback! Philippe has already posted a blog on the talk that you can read here.
Pitching
Each of the speakers had to brief their session in a thirty seconds pitch. This was mine:
This is unusual for me, because my co-presenter is in Paris! Philippe and I will demonstrate how we adopted the practices of Extreme Programming in our distributed team. We will also have two live demos; the first on remote pair programming and the second on remote meetings.
The talk
The audience started taking their seats; and in a couple of minutes, the room was full! We started by engaging the audience with three simple questions!
Who goes to work by car?
Who goes to work by bus?
Who goes to work on Skype?
Extreme programming
After introducing ourselves, our team and Murex, we spent the first half of the talk discussing four of the XP practices and their benefits.
- Ten Minutes Build
- Helps developers stay focused on what they are doing
- Shorten the feedback loop
- Encourages developers to submit frequently thus resulting in easier bug analysis
- TDD
- Only coding what makes tests pass decreases the possibility of generating bugs
- In most cases, a failing unit test is enough to detect where the bug is and thus reducing the need for debugging
- The refactoring step drives to clean code
- Finding difficulty writing a test is an indication that refactoring is required
- Pair Programming
- Benefits:
- Newcomers tend to learn faster and submit on their first day
- The quality of our code has increased
- We didn’t notice any negative any impact on productivity
- It helped us build a bonded team
- Difficulties
- It is very tiring for both the driver and navigator
- It is risky because some developers prefer to work alone
- Benefits:
- Retrospectives: For this part, we explained the five stages of our retrospectives
- Check-in/energizer
- Throwback
- Collect insights & discuss
- Actions
- ROTI
Extreme programming in remote mode
Our second half of the talk was dedicated to sharing how we are applying XP in a remote mode, mainly focusing on Pair-Programing and Retrospectives. The discussion included the difficulties we faced at the beginning and how we managed to solve them. We ended the discussion on both topics by a live demo!
- Remote Pair Programming
- To overcome the problem of time difference between the two cities, the pairs tend to share their calendars as well as an online document with the detailed tasks required to finish the story
- The navigator might easily lose focus; that is why we try to submit frequently and switch control as much as possible
- It is more tiring than local pair-programming especially if you have the headset on all day long. We agreed that anyone is free to ask for a break at any time
- Remote Retrospectives
- The whiteBoards were located in Paris, and thus it was hard for us in Beirut to effectively contribute to the meetings. We managed to solve this problem by replacing our the whiteboard with an online Trello boards.
- Initially, our meetings were held over the phone lacking any visualization of the team on the other side which caused a lot of frustration. To overcome this problem, our IT team installed Visio Conference rooms in both cities!
Here is a short video of the PairProgramming demo we did!
Main message
“You don’t have to move abroad for your dream job!“.
Remote work is becoming the trend! The advancement of the collaboration tools and technologies is making it easier for companies to adopt. In the future, you will see more and more developers working from home.
That was our message to the audience! We concluded that there are three ways to organize your team when working remotely:
- Split the team in two if there are enough members in each city
- Work in open-source mode if team members are distributed over many cities
- Finally, adopt our remote XP practices if it is not possible to split the team in two
Feedback
In addition to the above two Kudo cards, I received several positive verbal feedback at the end of the session. All that was a sign that our talk was successful!
Slides
Finally, you can have a look on our slides here:
AHMAD ATWI 