eXPosure Workshop      

The eXPosure Workshop™ exposes participants to the concepts of Agile Software Development in general and Extreme Programming (XP) in particular through a variety of presentations and exercises. It is broken into three sections.

XP Overview Seminar

Our 1.5 hour seminar for executives, project leads, business sponsors and software developers

• introduces the principles and practices of XP
• demonstrates why and how it can revolutionize the way an organization develops software

This introduction is appropriate for all audiences and would lead into follow-on activities such as those outlined below.

The Extreme Hour

The idea of this activity is to get people to experience many of the concepts of XP in a way that illustrates the relationship of the roles of business and development. People are broken into teams of about 10 to tackle a two iteration development project in an elapsed project time of one hour. (Each team runs their own project). The entire activity takes 1.5 to 2 hours due to set up and wrap-up activities. This is also appropriate for all audiences (business and technical) as the development process requires no programming. Although it is not essential, we have found it very helpful to have business people play the technical roles and technical people to play the business roles during the simulated project.

Going Deeper via an eXtreme Presentation

This activity would take approximately 3 hours, with a short break in the middle. It demonstrates the XP approach to iteration planning. The workshop participants, acting as the customer, prioritize and plan the rest of the workshop based on information from the workshop leaders, who assume the role of developer.

A variety of topics will be discussed... some based on previously prepared information, some customized based on the workshop leaders experiences and the particular context described by the participants. At times some hands-on activities will be added. Several more detailed presentations about some of the individual practices and "a day in the life of XP" are examples of previously prepared information as well as a non-software example of an agile approach to development (a VCR hooked to an LCD projector or large screen TV is necessary for this).