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July 15, 2005

These Are A Few Of My Favourite Things

I've been reading the (completely) revised edition of Extreme Programming Explained today and came across the following statement under the "Sit Together" section in the chapter on Practices: "Tearing down the cubicle walls before the team is ready is counterproductive". Upon reading this, I immediately thought back to a previous project where, after a little reflection, I ranked tearing down cubicle walls as one of the most productive things I did as a padewan Iteration Manager. And to be perfectly honest, I really didn't give much thought about the team's reaction to my plans: "I'm sick of having to walk 20 paces to talk to the rest of the team a couple of times each hour!" was all the motivation I needed.

But I wanted to talk about the other things I remember proudly from time on that project and how trivial they seem in isolation. In no particular order:

  • Tearing down cubicle walls separating the two parts of the team
  • Rotating the Iteration Manager role throughout the entire team
  • Using a Friday afternoon (after an Iteration Close) to run a RoboCode competition
  • Using another Friday afternoon to run a refactor-a-thon on a particularly nasty piece of the codebase
  • One particular TDD session with a local developer where he was really grokking TDD for the first time

And top on my list of biggest disappointments (from the same project):

  • Even after bitching and complaining 'til the cows came home, never getting a proper on-site customer... until the week after I left :-(

  • No managing to convince anyone that having two developers who were only 50% allocated to this project is so much worse than having a single 100% developer

Posted by Andy Marks at July 15, 2005 03:13 PM

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