My Teddy Bear went to XP Days Germany 2012

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My Teddy Bear went to XP Days Germany 2012

And here is the proof:

Mosaic Works Teddy Bear
My pairing partner

My teddy bear was willing to go with me to Hamburg because after facilitating the Brutal Refactoring Game, Taking Baby Steps and TDD as if you meant it at the SoCraTes conference I was invited by Marc Philipp to facilitate again one of those sessions at XP Days Germany. Marc he helped me a with the German website, he submitted two sessions for me and in the end the conference organizers chose the Taking Baby Step as a winner.

I was happy I could meet passionate people from Germany at this conference. Then Alex decided to come along with me at the conference.We made all the preparations and off we went to the beautiful city of Hamburg!

I knew all the sessions were in German on the website, so I took the decision to attend more the Open Space Software Development track. I there met again Marc, Lars and Bastian whom I had met for the first time at ALE2012 in Barcelona. I helped a bit with testing the application, found some bugs and fixed minor issues. Of course, it was really hard to set-up the Java environment for the application. It took me around one hour to understand what was the issue. So now I love Java Enterprise even more…

I attended one session “Architectural Kata” facilitated by Benjamin and I asked him kindly if he could do it in English. He accepted and I want to thank him again, because at SoCraTes I had two chances to attend this session, but it simply did not fit in my schedule then. The session is a very interesting idea of iterating on an architecture and making it better. You can find here or here more information on that.

I talked a lot with people I knew already from the awesome Softwerkskammer (Software Craftsmanship) Groups in Germany. I enjoyed seeing them again and talking about a lot of interesting things. I met a lot of interesting people at the conference, and I enjoyed their ideas on a lot of matters from code quality to lean start-up and intreprenourship.

In the evening Jan and Andreas asked me if I could do a session on TDD as if you meant it. It was not planned at all. Of course I accepted, we asked for a projector, invited more people on twitter and we ended up on having a coding dojo in 7 people on TDD as if you meant it. It was a really nice having an unplanned coding dojo, but again we were at an Extreme Programming conference, so this should be usual!

By applying the TDD as if you meant it rules we wrote some tests, extracted some methods and we refactored it a lot by focusing on the Four Elements of Simple Design. The people still got the hang out of it and we wrote only two tests, but with better and better names. Thanks guys for wanting to learn so much! You can find here the code that we a kind of wrote :). Here is the feedback from this impromptu session:

TDD as if you meant it feedback
TDD as if you meant it feedback

On Friday I had my session: Taking Baby Steps. The idea of the session is that you need to write a test and implementation in two minutes. If you cannot do this, then you revert to your last good commit and try again with some smaller behaviour, hence you make a smaller step. After your test is green you commit it and then you take as many two minutes time slots to refactor. The same idea: the refactoring should fit in the two minutes timebox. If you cannot do it, then you revert and try again refactoring with a smaller refactoring.

Taking Baby Steps
Taking Baby Steps

Thank you everyone that attended because you were willing to do something new and strange. The session was well received by the audience, here is the feedback I got from the conference organizers:

Feedback from the attendees
Feedback from the attendees

Alex had submitted a session on the “wild-card” competition of the conference. Anyone could have submitted a session, and then the audience voted for three of them: the most number of votes got 25 minutes, the second place 15 and the third 10 minutes. Alex decided to make a live coding kata with the tagline “you don’t need to read legacy code to understand it“.

Alex explaining how to write tests on existing code
Alex explaining how to write tests on existing code

His session was voted on the first place, at close distance to the second place. He used the Trivia codebase that JB Rainsberger introduced to us together with the Legacy Code Retreat.




At the end of the conference I was in the jury of the context “Who is the best Agile person in Germany?” together with Marc Philipp and Andreas Leidig. It was a very funny event with food, beers and three stages for the contestants: identify the most coding smells, recognize blurry pictures of Agile people, and make a performing kata in parallel. The funny thing was that Jan and Marcel ended up in the last session and Marcel started pairing with Jan. So they both had the first prize 🙂

All in all XP Days was an interesting conference, even thought I would have liked English to be the language of the conference and not German.

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3 thoughts on “My Teddy Bear went to XP Days Germany 2012

  1. It’s not they I would be against some other technique for the open space, but we are mostly Java developers in our company, so for the moment that’s all we can offer 🙂 Thx for yet taking the time to participate. At least next time you’ll have the environment already running 😉 We’re planning on doingthe open space again at the Agile Dev Practices conference next year.

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