Into the fire

So, I gave this XP presentation to the whole of the company yesterday. And I only found out that I had to do it 48 hours in advance. (There is a story here about miscommunication, but I couldn't be bothered...).

Firstly, the XP meme is well and truly established here as a good way to do things. The important step is to start doing it. Hopefully, well get an immersion workshop run on site here within the next month...

But back to what I thought I wanted to express. I mulled over what to present for some time and had some serious writers block while trying to pull my ideas together. In the end, the night before, I just jotted down a bunch of notes in some coherent order and threw them together for some slides. And in the process, I feel I've made some hasty dodgy points.

The talk was focused at the company to give them a feel for how our interactions with the customer would be different with XP. So I broke the talk into two parts: the first being a philosophical view of XP and the last being a practical view of XP. Practical was simple - User Stories and Iterations mainly. This gave a good platform for the discuss of scope and how to sell to new customers. But the first, I could probably done better or without.

The main point that bugs me from the talk was that I started talking about Scope, Time and Quality in regards to delivery value to the Customer. We have followed a waterfall-ish method in the past. Big fat documents that are written in advance of the actual work being done. To me, this says of the 3 constraints for delivery, we saw Scope as the most important. After that, we agreed with the Customer to a timeframe for the delivery of the Scope and therefore Time was the next important constraint. Quality is left as an exercise for the programmer. Nothing new there, you probably have seen this equation before.

Then I said that XP elevates Quality from the least important constraint to the most important constraint. I didn't comment much about Time and Scope, but my feeling is that we then had these to the Customer. Quality is now defined as exactly what the customer has asked for within an iteration in the simplest code and design.

I feel that I'm right here, but I don't think I really needed to present that to the audience. I'll have to sleep on that one a bit longer I think.