We were a bit worried because we didn’t know how many people would attend our workshop. The conference agenda for that day was full of interesting sessions and attending to our full-day workshop would imply missing all those sessions.

To our surprise we started the session with ~15 participants! After the ice-breaker activity we shared the full set of activities we had plan for the session and asked the participants to vote them, so we can concentrate in those more interesting for the audience. After voting, the final plan was not very different to what had prepared.

During the morning we presented our vision of XP «new practices» and drilled into one of them: Infrastructure as Code. These two topics generated some interesting discussion.

Before taking a break we checked with the audience how to continue. At that point some people left the session, but about the half decided to complete the workshop. So after a 30 minutes break we we jumped into Continuous Delivery, we reviewed the main concepts and we did a demo.

The next topic was User Story Mapping which only one of the participants knew about. We presented the technique and then we put it in practice.

The latest topic was Specification by Example, we explained the technique and put it in practice using Cucumber-JVM and working a «enterprise-like» application we built for the occasion. We work on a set of stories identified in the Story Mapping. For each of them we provided a ser of rules and asked the participants to work in pairs to write examples, validate them with US and them implement them.

As usual, at the end we asked for participant to rank the workshop and we get 4.3 out of 5 which for us was great! Here are some quotes form participants:

I really appreciated seeing Story Mapping and BDD in action –  especially the continuity between the two because they used the same example project.

 

Certainly a lot of valuable things covered and I learned a lot.

 

Definitely worth attending!

Here are some pictures and here is the slide deck we used (it does not have much information and because of that we are writing an booklet some participants can drill down in the different topics)

 

 

The journey started with a very interesting keynote by Elizabeth Hendrickson who shared how they at doing XP at scale in Pivotal Labs.

After that I went to the session Symbiotic Design Practices by Michael Feathers.

In the afternoon I attended the session Example Mapping by the Cucumber guys. The session was very interactive and I really liked the approach proposed by Matt and Steve (the guys in charge of the session). I will share my info about this session in a future post.

My next session was a Panel where some «agile rock starts» discussed about the Agile Hype. The session was fine but at a certain point I felt it was not adding value to me, so I left the room and went into the hall to do some networking.

At 6 PM I joined the Open Space Marketplace where I proposed a Smalltalk Introductory session for that same day.

At the 7 PM there was a nice Whisky Tasting activity and right after that I went back to the open space to join a session about Mutation testing. Next to it, was my Smalltalk session. Seven guys joined the session and we did a walkthrough over Pharo Smalltalk that took about one hour. By the end of the session it was almost 10 and I went to my room to review some stuff for the workshop I had to run the next day.

Today we (@dfontde and me) will held this workshop that is focused on a set of practices we consider have take the main stage in software development over the last couple of years.

During morning we will review the foundations of XP and we will share a backlog creation technique called User Story Mapping.

In the afternoon we will continue with Infrastructure as Code, BDD, DevOps and Continuous Delivery. For this second part we will work with Java, Cucumber, Jenkins and Ansible.

Even when the workshop is full-day we invite xpconf participant to join either in the morning or in the afternoon. We think the workshop is great resource for those just starting with agile and also for those that are already practicing it but that would like to get familiar with the mentioned practices.

The workshop is based on our Software Engineer course at UNTreF University and we have already run it a couple of times with very good results.