Today my ambition is to coach other teams in learning to adapt new styles of development akin to XP, SCRUM, and other Agile methodologies.
You can reach me at steyaert dot patrick at pandora dot be.
I first heard about XP when I was visiting the software composition group led by Oscar Nierstrasz at the University of Bern. These were still the early days of XP (1997). So 6 months later, when I was leading the software development team at MediaGeniX, I was able to get Kent Beck over and spend a couple of days with our group. This got our development group excited about XP ideas. Later on I learned about Jim Highsmiths' "Adaptive Software engineering" and also about SCRUM and other agile methodologies. I learned that there was more than XP alone. While XP attrackted the attention of the development group. SCRUM and adaptive software enegineering ideas got spread into our group of project managers and business analysts. We were ready to make a step towards implementing an Agile approach! And so we did. To give a sample. We organised all development in sprints (6 to 8 team members closely working together for max. 4 weeks). During a sprint, each day started with a SCRUM meeting, going over the task list. Sprints started with a kick-off and ended with an evaluation. Pair programming, test first design, ... you know the rest. The entire team learned a lot and we got real results in terms of quality, performance, individual satisfaction, and allignement with our business goals.
