Rachel Davies

A long time ago, XP was the only flavour of Agile software development around. Nowadays it’s seen as a sprinkle of technical practices that may be added to Scrum or Kanban. The power of XP collective ownership has been lost and programmers rarely find environments where they can pair. No one talks about Merciless Refactoring or the courage to Just Say No. What’s the point in being a craftsman if you have no power?

Back in 2000, Rachel was a developer at Connextra, one of the first XP teams in Europe. She now leads a development team at Unruly in London, where XP has been used continuously for 10 years. Rachel is not a consultant with any interest in selling an approach. She’s happy to speak openly about how long running XP teams work. Many of our common practices seem counterintuitive to developers and managers who focus on efficiency over value delivery.

Come to this talk to hear about what eXtreme Programming really means to developers and how it’s practiced in an organisation embraces change every day. Find out what modern XP looks like in 21st century.

When you lead a software team, everyone benefits from setting firm foundations. You will find that developers on your team work better together with a clear vision and sense of purpose. With a firm foundation, you will be able to strike a balance between innovation and consistency on technical architecture. All this is underpinned by a streamlined approach to daily work, where the team can see progress and improve practical skills on the way.

When you build firm foundations, your team will be able to handle the changes that a fast-paced business throws down. When you have the key to individual developer motivation, conflicts become easier to resolve and you will find team discussion inspires improvement. In order to inspire confidence from others, you need a solid approach, trust springs from your skills so you need to keep them sharp.

In this workshop, you will acquire a new framework that helps set up a team for success maintaining momentum on delivering business value. The skills we will cover can be useful at any point in the life of a project. Come to this workshop if you aspire to lead software teams to deliver great products while finding satisfaction in their craft.

We will cover a range of topics through presentation and practical exercises, you will have the opportunity to try all the techniques explained in the workshop. We will talk about real scenarios that you are likely to face and ways that you can lead your team through them. As you will learn, the secret is to build firm foundations for your technical leadership.

Prerequisites: The only prerequisite for this workshop is some experience working in software development and a desire to lead teams to success. This workshop is suitable for most conference attendees whether they are senior developers, technical managers, and architects.