Xp Man XL

I think it was probably 5 years ago that I read Kent Beck's XP explained. The book had a profound effect on me, not because there was anything radical but more the fact that the ideas contained just seemed to resonate with me. 5 years have passed and Extreme Programming kind of went off the radar. When people thought of Agile then generally meant Scrum and many of the practices I associated with XP were deemed superfluous or perhaps too extreme.

However over the last 7 months or so Manchester has started its own XP group and I believe that interest is growing again. As well as monthly meetings at the ever accommodating MadLab, the group organises short guerilla coding dojos and today we had a code retreat, an extra large XP Manchester if you will.

The day was split in to 2 halves. In the morning we had 3 sessions of Conway's Game of Life and in the afternoon we tackled 3 sessions for the CheckOut kata. Time passed surprisingly quickly and both sessions were interesting. The group dynamic was mainly .Net developers, then Python, a Ruby dev and a Java dev.

Conway's Game of Life is a simple simulation of cellular generation. Cell lifetimes are governed by simple rules and so the problem lends itself easily to any language. The group was split into pairs and tasked with finishing the problem. We then swapped pairs and started the problem again, encouraged to approach the problem in a different way. I worked with C# & MsTest, then C#/MSpec, then Python and its unit test framework.

What I took from the retrospectives was the diversity of the approaches to the relatively simple problem. Whereas other groups kept on thinking in terms of grids and cells, my pairs concentrated on the behaviour. Some groups gave cells a tolerance, there were different state models. It just goes to show how we interpret language differently.

The afternoon CheckOut kata sessions were done in a different way. We had one session to finish the kata, one to refuctor and we were supposedly going to have a third to refactor it back. Fortunately we didn't have chance to do the third session and there were some great examples of terrible code that I certainly didn't want to touch with a barge pole.

Refuctoring is the process of taking a well-designed piece of code and, through a series of small, reversible changes, making it completely unmaintainable by anybody except yourself. Comprehensive regression testing guarantees that nobody will be any the wiser.   

Surprisingly it was difficult to deliberately write bad code intentionally. (yes I said intentionally) However once you got going it was a lot of fun. I worked with Mark Kirschstein and we had fun with xml, huge switch statements, dead code and much more. The stand out worst involved an ascii Dr. Spock and some brilliant Linq abuse.

The day was lots of fun and great to see some python written by a python developer. The group is full of people who love their trade and its a pleasure to write code with them. These events just give so much. Unless you are lucky its rare that get to work with developers that are willing to improve and share their skills. If you are interested in attending or contributing a session in the future please join the google group or follow the blog.

Thanks to everyone involved today!