If you are going to Tech Ed 2006:

• Come to Party with Palermo
• Stop by my Bird’s of a Feather session on “Agile Development with .Net”

The session will be on Tuesday at 7:45PM

This BoF will not seek to convince people on the merits of Agile: there are plenty of print resources that weigh in on that topic.  It will focus on what has been working and what hasn’t for real teams practicing some or many of the Agile practices.  I personally with have some good success stories as well as a few “if we had only. . .” stories.

I hope you will come and share what has/has not been working for your team.

Sam has already posted about it here, but I’ll continue.

Yesterday’s Austin .Net User Group meeting was a big success.  We had 80 people, our largest crowd in a long time.  Miguel Castro was pretty close with 75, but for the past several months we’ve had over 5 first-time guests, so people are spreading the word about the group.  I try to keep the group focused on software concepts that are core to building sustainable software that can add value to the business now and for years to come.  If you believe in “voting with your feet”, then these topics are getting a lot of votes. 

Sam answered a question about what skills were needed in a developer, and he made a great point:  A good software developer is one who can create software that’s easy to change.  Not someone who’s an expert in SQL server, Indigo, ASP.NET, etc because those technologies will be the next legacy systems.  A good developer hops from technology to technology but always keeps the software easy to change – after all, that’s the only constant.

We normally go until 7:30pm, but yesterday we went to 8:05 (Sam could have talked until midnight, but I had to cut him off), and 75% of the folks stayed to the very end (60 out of 80).  It was obvious that everyone was very interested in what was being said.

We went to Rudy’s BBQ afterward and continued the discourse.  12 folks stayed until 10:30pm talking about TDD, iterations, FIT, estimating, how to handle a developer that’s not pulling his weight, etc.  Great talk!

Sam was amazed that it was 80 degrees in the middle of the day and 70 degrees late at night.  He’s used to it being bitterly cold.  For us, that’s just what it’s like in Texas – of course we deal with 100+ in the summer also, and it only snows once a decade.

Yesterday (Sunday), Sam Gentile came into town on his INETA speaker trip to the Austin .Net User Group.  Since we had some extra time with Sam before the user group meeting, I organized a bbq at my house in Leander, TX. 
We grilled some inch-thick ribeye steaks on the back patio and had a
good time talking about software for hours.  We talked about the
merits of FIT, automation, and other things in play in the extreme
programming world.  Some people you might know in attendance (and
if I didn’t list your name, get a blog) were:  Sam Gentile, Steve Donie, Blake Caraway, Jeremy Miller, and Scott Bellware.

He said something that stands out in my mind, and I may change the way
I view and talk about the way I work on a day-to-day basis.  I’ve
been using the term “Agile” to describe the group of practices that I
and my team uses.  He has convinced me that the term “Extreme
Programming” is a more accurate term.  It really is extreme. 
There is a solid goal in sight, and we have to be very disciplined
about how we do things in order to keep our software
maintainable.  One way to think about it is:  How true is the
statment “grass is green”.  Is that statement somewhat true, or is it
very true?  Truth is extreme.  It is not relative  or
subjective.  Truth is truth, and there is no room for negotiation
before it ceases to be true.  With extreme programming, if you negotiation, it’s no longer extreme: it becomes moderate.  Moderate programming.

How good can it get?  It needs to be extremely good, not moderately good.

Sam is speaking to the user group as I write this post, and he
explains the principles of extreme programming extremely well. 
Great job, Sam!