Etudes, Kata, Practice
PragDave and Andy have been going on about coding/design exercises.Bill Wake has lots of wonderful games for programmers, which are also good exercises or kata for some of the moves in Extreme Programming. I've also used Joshua's XP playing cards to good effect, for a more conceptual sort of exercise.
Ron Jeffries calls them Etudes.
I am particularly interested in études, kata or exercises which focus on the human, collaborative side of Agile software development. Especially because we may easily think we don't need any practice in these areas.
What are good kata for perfecting XP's "Whole Team" practice ? The question may sound silly - just have your software projects' customers sit with their programming teams, and that's that. But Whole Team can only be effective if accompanied by a gamut of behaviours that take advantage of the interaction between customer and team.
What are effective protocols for asking questions to the customer ? For negotiating details of a user story's scope ? For announcing schedule problems ? (The issue of Cutter IT Journal I mentioned yesterday has a wonderful article on "Old Game" vs. "New Game" schedule negotiation.)
I work with a European group, the System Thinkers, to practice some specific problem-solving behaviours.
It turns out there is even a name for groups such as these, of people who exhibit intense dedication to the intentional practice of the professional behaviours they depend on: Communities of Practice.
No comments:
No trackbacks:
Trackback link:
Please enable javascript to generate a trackback url