XP2010

So last week I was lucky enough to attend XP2010 in Trondheim. It was an intense week with great people and great content. It’s kind of hard to process all this content, but it’s time to try.

After listening to the excellent advice of Ole Christian I attended the workshop of Chris Matts on Feature Injection . It was absolutely one of my best sessions at XP2010 and it turned out to be really relevant to what I’m doing at my current client. I think I’ll be able to use a lot of this when it comes to working with the requirements and really understanding what matters.

After an intense workshop it’s always good to listen to Mary Poppendieck talk about Lean in a nutshell . I’ve heard or read a lot of her stuff before, but she has a really unique way of explaining and selling her point of view. I always learn a lot from listening to her.

Ole Ellnestam and Daniel Brolund rounded off the day in a nice way with Mikado refactoring . It’s an interesting and structured way of doing large refactorings. I’ve done something similar with rolling back changes when I get stuck, but this is a nice structured way to approach it. Now if only my computer hadn’t been acting up I would actually be able to practice it a bit more.

The second day started out with a bang, first with a keynote by Scott Page, then listening to Cory Foy talk about craftsmanship. Head over to the program page of XP2010 to see the videos. It’s really worth the time. While you’re there also check out the talks by Mary Poppendieck and Marcus Ahnve.

Now I must admit that most of thursday was lost to my nerves, as I was holding two lightning talks that day. Of the ones I saw and really liked was the talk of Jonas Follesø about the Blackbox Recorder . This sparked quite an interest in the Java crowd, so some started the Java version: Jackbox Recorder . Sadly one of my talks was at the same time as the My Agile Suitcase Pecha Kucha, so I didn’t get to see it. I heard great things about it. Luckily there’s video out.

On the last day, conference fatigue were setting in. But I got a great session of Coding Katas. Interesting to both see other languages and other people code. I really also liked the workshop Cory Foy gave on innovation games. It opened my eyes on how to do facilitation around requirements and features, and tied quite nicely into the stuff from the first day with Feature Injection.

Well, this is just a try at writing down what I remember and process some of the information. I know it’s summary, just let me know if there’s something I should expand ont.

It was really a great conference, like none I’ve attended before. Thank you to all the brilliant people that I met and the organizers.