We’re still alive!
Don’t forget that XP Manchester still meets on the second Thursday of every month!
Currently all our meetings are online only, and take the form of a virtual Lean Coffee before work (0745 UK time). You can find all the joining details at https://www.meetup.com/xp-manchester/.
Hope to see you there!
The home of XP Manchester
In these new days of hybrid working and no in-person XP Manchester meetings it would still be nice to be able to feel part of the #xpman community. But it’s not easy to find where that online community lives. So Mark and James and I had a chat earlier this week and we agreed that, for the time being at least, you will be able to find XP Manchester in only the following places:
Meeting announcements, meeting reports, news, discussion
Meeting calendar, meeting reminders, joining instructions
@ XPManchester and #xpman on Twitter
Automated meeting announcements
If you find XP Manchester online anywhere else (LinkedIn, Slack, even this blog), it should tell you it’s deprecated and point you either to this blog post or one of the above.
Mark hasn’t ruled out getting in-person meetings started again at some point, but that is unlikely to be for some while yet. So in the meantime, we’re online only. See you at the next lean coffee morning!
Another great coffee morning!
This morning’s XPman lean coffee was another hugely enjoyable event, attended by 15 people this time.
The topics discussed ranged from “Never write a line of production code without a failing test” to “Is it inevitable that agile adoption will eventually be subverted into anti-agile?” and plenty in between. The folks in the room had a wide range of experience, and so each topic elicited some good and thought-provoking discussion. So many thanks to old hands and first timers alike — great to have you here!

Next meeting: Thursday August 11th; doors open 0730 (UK time) for a 0745 start; joining details same as this time. Hope to see you there.
To keep up with news and announcements from XP Manchester follow the #xpman hashtag across your socials and subscribe to this blog.
Next coffee morning: July 14th!
Just a quick reminder that our July coffee morning is tomorrow, July 14th on Zoom! Doors open 0730 (UK time) for a 0745 start. All joining details can be found in last month’s post: https://xpmanchester.wordpress.com/2022/06/01/were-back/.
Looking forward to seeing all of you there!
First coffee morning was a great success!
Big thanks to everyone who came along to XP Manchester for lean coffee this morning!
It was great to see some new faces and some familiar faces. 16 of us had a great time discussing remote pairing, introducing XP, mobbing, …
To keep up with news and announcements from XP Manchester follow the #xpman hashtag across your socials and subscribe to this blog.
Next meeting is July 14th!

We’re back!
Welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends. Ladies and gentlemen …
After a long hiatus, XP Manchester is back — albeit in a somewhat different form. Starting this month (June 2022) we’ll be running a monthly Lean Coffee morning. And as per XPman tradition, it will be on the second Thursday of every month, so the next few dates for your diary are: June 9, July 14, August 11, September 8, … and so on.
What is Lean Coffee? There’s a barely adequate description on leancoffee.org, but essentially it’s a chance to discuss all matters eXtreme Programming-related with your friends and peers. Everyone is welcome, whether you know a lot or a little about XP / TDD etc, whether you’ve been to XPman before or you’re new to the group. You get a chance to table discussion topics that interest you the most, and you’ll be surprised how often you’re able to give help and guidance on other people’s topics.
These sessions will be online only, hosted on Zoom (joining details below) by me, Kevin Rutherford. The session times are as follows:
0730 Doors open (ie. zoom call starts), general chit-chat & introductions
0745 Lean coffee
0845 Finish
(All timings are UK time.)
We will use LeanCoffeeTable instead of post-its and sharpies, so please join our board as a guest at the start of the meeting.
Please share this announcement with anyone you know who may be interested. And to get all future news about XP Manchester, subscribe to this blog and follow @xpmanchester and #xpman on Twitter.
Looking forward to seeing you on Thursday!
Important links:
Zoom meeting link
Anyone with this link can join the meeting
LeanCoffeeTable link
Please join this board as a guest when you join the zoom session
Meetup page
Repeats all the info from this blog post. Meetup membership is definitely not necessary to attend these coffee mornings!
[deferred] #xpman 132 – New Refactoring Exercise
Delayed again!
Ran out of ideas so threw together some horrible code to practise refactoring that isn’t one of the usual suspects of the trivia app or gilded rose – as awesome as those exercises are, I thought I’d add in a bit of variety for us.
The example is written in javascript, so I would recommend arriving with WebStorm (there is a month’s free trial) installed as it has some of the best javascript refactoring support.
We’ll be on Zoom, and I’ll email the link to people shortly before the meeting starts.
Thursday 17th June, meeting from 18:30 BST, starting the session at 19:00.
Grab a free ticket
[deferred] #xpman 131 – Spike & Stabilise
Apologies at the failure to come up with a session in a timely fashion – as such will defer this to the 3rd Thursday of the month instead of the usual 2nd.
The topic next week will be spiking & stabilising, which will be a bit of a ramble, a demonstration, and a possible practical / discussion afterwards.
Online
20th May 18:30 for a 19:00 start
#xpman 130 A Taxonomy for TDD
April’s XPManchester is a hybrid practical/discussion session based around the idea of trying to classify “moves” we can make whilst developing using TDD.
Bill Wake recently described TDD as a tension between making progress on the feature and stabilising what we have.
Online (Zoom) 8th April 2021
Meet from 18:30 for a 19:00 Start
Grab a ticket
#xpman 129 – TDD & Emergent Design, Demonstrated through Sudoku
In this session, Ian Howarth demonstrates some of the points he was making in January’s discussion about how he approaches TDD, by making a program to to solve Sudoku problems.
This will be an interactive session, with opportunities for discussion and questions as Ian walks us through the problem.
March 11th 2021 18:30
Tickets