The XP2013 Challenges!

XP2013: My Three Agile Challenges for You in Vienna

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A personal message from Erik Lundh:

In 1949, Orson Welles made famous the role of Harry Lime in the British film noir, ‘The Third Man,’ written by novelist Graham Greene. ‘The Third man’ movie is about a mystery challenge around post-WWII espionage that takes place in Vienna, Austria.

I am not Orson Welles, but we might have already met at some conference in Europe, Asia or North America.
Now I have Three Challenges for You at XP2013 in Vienna, Austria.

Last year I was the organizer and general chair for XP2012, a conference that I have attended every year since its inception. The XP2012 conference, held at the same Malmo Sweden location as this year’s Eurovision Song Contest, kept me busy behind the scenes and I could not do any workshops or talks myself.

This year I have no official capacity, and I was free to submit proposals like anyone else. The XP2013 conference generously accepted 3 of my 14 wildly different ideas; the ones that I now like to call my Three Agile Challenges for You, all happening at XP2013. Please accept any of these challenges and join us in Vienna for the 14th installment of the original European agile conference, XP2013

Erik Lundh

Btw: To experience Vienna in 1949 in the "The Third Man" movie on DVD or Youtube is a great preparation for your visit to XP2013 in Vienna, Austria

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Challenge 1: Can You Pull Off Agile Development In An Hour?

The Extreme Hour Revival

We will plan-develop-release 2 iterations of a surprise product in 60 work minutes.

We will use the visual Planning Game, Pair Work, Continuous Integration, Simple Design, etc.

Just mechanical Scrum or Kanban will not be good enough; you really need to understand successful agile development. We will have a short intro on XP-style development, from executive sponsorship, through management/market interaction to team and programmer behavior. 10 volunteers will develop live on stage with an audience that acts as the market, throwing in new request on the fly. Development and integration on whiteboards, with real visual index-cards-on-the-wall co-creation planning that has brought success to thousands of agile teams.

No backlogs or sprinting like idiots, no CDCs (Certified Dilbert Characters).
Bring your best game and participate!

The Extreme Hour format was invented by Peter Merel in the late 1990s to bring a common understanding to techies and non-techies alike in the company where he worked at the time. The first international Extreme Hour was held at the inaugural XP2000 conference.

http://xp2013.org/program/industry/the-extreme-hour-revival/

Request for active participation: We need 10 people for the development team(6 developers, 2 product managers and 2 testers). We also need an audience that act as a market throwing in new requests.

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Challenge 2: Can You Present Your Message or Demo with 20 slides in 6:40 minutes?

Pecha Kucha – Hone Your Presentation Skills

Like it or not, if you are going to influence more than a few people you need to be good at presentations. Not everyone can get a spot on the TED conference but the Pecha Kucha is another great challenge.
The Pecha Kucha format was invented 10 years ago at a Tokyo design school to help design students better focus on their message. Today Pecha Kucha Nights, a public open stage dedicated to this presentation format, are held on a regular basis in more than 500 cities around the world. Ignite! is a variation on Pecha Kucha that cuts the time of each of the 20 slides down to 15 seconds per slide.

You create 20 slides. No more, no less.
They are put in a slide deck out of your control and advances automatically every 20 seconds.
You tell your story to your changing slides.
After 6:40 minutes your 20 slides has passed. Then you stop talking and take a bow to applause.

The strict format forces you to distill your story and use your 20 visual impressions much more carefully.

You might even find that it is hard to fill 20 slides once you found your true core message.

Pecha Kucha was a very popular event at XP2010 where we saw well-known agilists like Mary Poppendieck and Rachel Davies take on the challenge.

Now we want you up there! Don't you worry, we help you prepare!

More information about the international Pecha Kucha phenomena http://www.pechakucha.org/

Erik Lundh will host on-demand preparation workshops on Monday and Tuesday evenings to help any presenter who needs support in preparing their Pecha Kucha.
Erik has lately delivered a few Pecha Kucha presentations of his own at local Pecha Kucha Nights at his hometowns city theater stage.

http://xp2013.org/program/industry/pecha-kucha-your-presentation-skills/

Request for active participation: We will run a maximum of 7 presenters each doing one Pecha Kucha-style presentation .

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Challenge 3: Can You Find the Pitfalls while coding TDD-style Live?

Thinking About TDD: A Russian Doll – Filled With Clockworks

(Not Arthur C Clarke’s monolith full of stars)

Two volunteers from the audience go on stage and work through a simple exercise – dojo style. The presenter will coach them through an innocent enough TDD kata - which most if not all people fail at, ending up in a very common TDD tarpit. We help them out, clean them up and go use that learning to develop, on stage, a foreign language parser where the developers do not understand the foreign language (Your choice of foreign language: e g Chinese, French, Danish, Swahili) while the product manager at another computer is someone who knows enough of the foreign language to build test cases in Fitnesse that drives the developers towards successfully parsing the foreign language without knowing it.

http://xp2013.org/thinking-about-tdd-a-russian-doll-full-of-clockworks/

Request for active participation: We need two developers that are fluent in java and/or python. We also need at least one person that is fluent in French or another language where the counting words are irregular. (Like Danish)