#xpman 102 – Christmas Kata

John Nicholas managed to find a special present in a code base.

With the festive spirit being strong the inclination is to share the joy of bringing to bear some craftiness to make testable a piece of code that is core to this years present delivery.

So far several would be saviours of christmas have already failed.

WE NEED YOU or else we are going to have to simply skin an of an off the shelf ecommerce platform.

Bring a laptop. Doors open at Code Computerlove at half 6 to start at 7.

Get your tickets here.

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#xpman 101 – Why is that taking so long? A Systems Thinking look at Organising an Organisation to Work

This month we’ll be thinking about organisation problems and team (failures in) co-operation, through the lens of Systems Thinking.

During the session we will simulate working as separate teams in an organisation, exploring how common team anti patterns may manifest. The practical will facilitate a discussion, and there will be a small overview of some of the Systems Thinking concepts at work in the simulation.

This is an introductory level session, No Systems Thinking knowledge is necessary.

For the practical portion of the evening all you will need is a smart phone (or laptop) and a Twitter account.

As normal, we will be meeting at 6:30pm for a 7:00pm start.

Grab a free ticket if you’re coming

#xpman 100 – Monthly Meetup

We made it! 100 sessions of XPManchester, 100 months of last minute organisation par excellence.

Taking the averages per session, 100 monthly meetups roughly translates to…

• 50 announcements made the week before
• 50 announcements made the week of (like this one)
• 200 uses of the word ‘Connascence’ by Kevin
• 500 pints of post meetup cider drunk by Mark
• 12 hours arguing whether you should write a test or not
• 48 consecutive hours arguing about ‘the right way’ to write a test
• 10 hours convincing people to use Cucumber
• 30 hours convincing people not to use Cucumber
• 300 unique anecdotes of how scrum sucks
• 10,000 lines of kata code written by you lot

Join us this month this month for a look back at our lifetime as a user group, a celebratory drink or two to mark the occasion, a light-hearted kata exercise and hopefully a good catch up with some old faces.

We’re at Plant NOMA, from 6:30 for a 7:00 Start.

Grab a ticket

 

 

#xpman 99 – A Distributed Kata

This month we’ll be working in small gorups on a distributed kata where the application is split into multiple processes. Groups will be required to coordinate to solve the problem and think about how this affects their approach to developing a solution.

Bring along a laptop. Doors open at half 6 and we’ll get started at 7.

Tickets available here.

#xpman98 – Wardely Mapping by @MrsDHW

This month’s session is on Wardley Mapping, an incredibly useful tool and will be presented by Danielle Haugedal-Wilson from the co-op.

Wardley Mapping is a tool to enable you to understand your business landscape and the context it operates in.

Wardley Mapping helps you answer questions like ‘should I buy or build this?’ ‘How should we organise ourselves’? and ‘What is really duplicated?’

This session will provide an introduction to the technique and then have a practical exercise to practise.

Get a Ticket

We are hosted by Madlab at Plant NOMA

9th Auguest 2018, 6:30 for a 7pm start.

#xpman 97 – Lightning Talks

Our annual Lightning talks session is here again. We have six confirmed speakers.

1. Gemma Cameron – DDD Europe Round up
2. Clare Sudbery (presenting remotely from London) – How Pairing Saved My Code Base
   Synopsis – Clare has been working on an iOS app for eighteen months now. It’s a personal project, and the key source of motivation is that the app itself is a game which she enjoys playing. This is both a blessing and a curse. She has been the developer, the QA, the BA, the project manager, the product owner, the major stakeholder and the end user. She is a demanding user: she wants new features and she wants them NOW. She has no sympathy for herself as a developer and frequently puts pressure on herself to prioritise delivery over code quality. When she stopped writing tests, she knew something had to change. So she brought Sal Freudenberg on board as equal partner, and now she’s behaving herself again. This is a description of the journey she and Sal are on.
3. Mashooq Badar – Material Focus
   Synopsis – Every craft has a relevant set of materials. A deep understanding of those materials is absolutely necessary to their work. What are the relevant materials to our craft and how do we use Material Focus to guide our work?
4. Dr Eleanor Mollett – Estimation for people who hate estimating
   Synopsis – I’ve never been a fan of estimating and have avoided it as much as I can. I now have a need to use estimates, here is how I do it in the quickest and least painful way possible” I think I can get it down to 10 minutes if you are pushed for time, but I’m still putting it together so can fit it to whatever your limit is
5. John Nicholas – Leeroy Driven Development
   Synopsis – Automating all the way to production in a cool, measured and calm manner that actually looks like a giant shit show.
6. Andy Lowry – Why can’t we just build websites?
   Synopsis – So you think testing web development is hard? Yeah, so did I! Little did I know how good we had it. I’ll give a whistle stop tour of some of the fun of beinga developer in an IoT Startup

 

Grab a ticket

As usual, we are open from 6:30 for a 7pm start, but we’re not at our old Madlab home, we’re now at PLANT NOMA

#xpman 96 – XP Misfortunes

As it’s our birthday we thought we’d try and have some fun this month. Players will be going head to head in a Family Fortunes XP Misfortunes game show where we consider common mispractices of XP/agile.

Doors open at half 6 to start at 7 at Code Computerlove’s office.

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/xpman-96-xp-misfortunes-tickets-46820203489