Integrating Personal Practices into a Development Process

Brian Lyons (Number Six Software, Inc.), Nate Oster (Number Six Software, Inc.)

Hands On · Process

Wednesday, 14:00, 3 hours 30 minutes | Meeting Room 15

It is critical that Agile processes be tuned by the team to fit the specific project context. If the team is just working from books, white papers, or training material, how can they ensure a shared vision of the actual process they apply? Do they have a shelf of books with each person told we do X and Y from this book, but not Z; instead of Z we do A and B from this other book, but C would never work for us; and we have our own little technique of Q... talk to Dave about that? The notion will be introduced of breaking a process into interrelated chunks (like the Software Process Engineering Metamodel or the description of Scrum here) with roles, work products, tasks, and guidance. An exemplar process, OpenUP, will be presented that provides a full process description that is lightweight and includes guidance on various agile techniques (e.g. TDD, Scrum-like tasking, agile estimation). The combination of the notion of a process model and the OpenUP process will be demonstrated in the process content authored with the open source Eclipse Process Framework Composer tool. Attendees will be invited to remark on quality practices they apply that are missing in the process, or to argue that something is "wrong" in this process for their context. For example, one person might remark that Pair Programming is missing in the process while another person would argue that "Project Manager" would never fly in their organization and the term "Team Lead" with a description more tuned for a Servant As Leader model should replace it. The EPF Composer tool has a fill-in the blank model for method elements including roles, work products, tasks, guidance, etc. In the session, paper forms will be available for attendees to describe a practice or edit existing content. The instructor will select a handful of process updates from the group and apply them to the process with the tool live resulting in an updated, published process tailored for the needs of the attendees. The EPF Composer tool and the OpenUP process library are available to attendees for free download under the Eclipse site. After the session, Number Six will host a copy of the presentation used for the overview content as well as the process content imported from the attendees' ideas.

Brian Lyons is co-founder and CTO of Number Six Software, “The Software Engineering Company”. He has worked in the software industry for twenty years, fostering iterative techniques within software development organizations. While spending much of his career as trainer, product-centered consultant, methodologist and mentor, Brian has continuously stayed close to the pragmatic issues of the software developer. Brian is co-author of UML 2 Toolkit from Wiley Publishing, a Certified Scrum Master, a member of the Agile Project Leadership Network, and the lead for the Open Unified Process content component of the Eclipse Process Framework project.

Nate Oster is the Quality Manager with Number Six Software’s Center for Software Development Innovation, where he helps clients adopt iterative development methods. He has more than 5 years experience with Unified Process-based test approaches that emphasize continuously measuring progress with tested functionality, high levels of maintainable test automation, and testing as a serious technical discipline. Nate inspires adopters with a combination of player-coaching and classroom simulations. He’s frequently consulted as an expert in system performance engineering and tuning distributed J2EE applications. Nate contributes to the open-source Eclipse Process Framework’s OpenUP project, focused on agile test processes. Previous projects include military logistics, clinical healthcare, and banking financial systems. Nate lives in northern Virginia, and enjoys technical rock climbing, backpacking, and travel, but is easily defeated at all card games.