#xpman 115 – Delivery Practice: How and Where to Slice

Time, Quality, Scope – AKA The Iron Triangle.

You have an ambitious deadline and you have no hope of getting everything the client wants done in time. How do you proceed? What do you cut? Why do you cut? In this practical exercise we look at feature slicing for maximum impact on a team’s delivery.

Doors open at 18.30 to start at 19.00

Tickets available here.

#xpman 114 – Christmas/Election refactoring

Given the festive time of year and the fact that this month’s event falls on election night we thought, why not combine the two. We’ll being flexing our refactoring skills in this month’s Christmas/Election themed exercise.

Thanks to this month’s hosts Code Computerlove. Doors open at 6.30 ready to start at 7. It’s a practical exercise so you’ll need a laptop between two.

Tickets available here.

Don’t forget to vote!

#xpman 113 – Agile Left Security Behind. Introducing the Fourth Amigo.

Running fast can have profound security impacts. As with maintainability and scalability, security is another quality of engineering, and it’s the team’s responsibility to at least get the basics right. Anthony, a former developer and XP Manchester attendee will cover off some of the security issues he frequently comes across in modern webapps, and how you can avoid those pitfalls early in development.

Anthony is an independent cyber security consultant with a software engineering background. He specialises in promoting DevSecOps to empower teams to take ownership of the security of their products early in the development process. He achieves this by delivering training and through security consultancy.

This month we are at the BrightHR offices, from 18:30 for a 19:00 start.

Grab a free ticket.

XP Manchester 112 – the silent coding game

This month we’ll be thinking about what makes code and tests readable. We’ll work in pairs on a problem and take it in turns to not be able to speak, making our code do the talking.

You’ll need a laptop between two. Doors open at 6.30pm to start at 7pm.

Tickets available here.

XP Manchester 111 – Patterns relevance in a serverless/microservice world

For the last four years XP Manchester has been running debates on topics such as “is TDD dead?”, “The case against Cucumber”, the merits of #NoEstimates and branching vs trunk based development.

This year we asked for your input and one of our regulars suggested “in a world of microservices and serverless functions, are clean code and patterns still relevant?”

This month we’re at Sorted Group’s office just off Albert Square. Doors open at 6.30 to start at 7pm.

Tickets available here

Debate Subjects

This month we’re looking to run another debate at xpmanchester.

In previous years we’ve debated “is TDD dead?”, “The case against Cucumber”, the merits of #NoEstimates and branching vs trunk based development.

We’re after suggestions and volunteers for other things to debate this year.

Why debate?

Our careers depend greatly on being able to make value judgements between two or more competing options, often the options come with supporters or detractors. Supporters or detractors that can make convincing sounding, yet fallacious arguments…

By participating in debates and entertaining ideas that we don’t necessarily immediately agree with, we are hoping to improve our critical thinking and reasoning.

We don’t want to just look for supporting evidence for our current stand point, we want to challenge it. Other smart people have come to different conclusions and tooling and processes and languages – what have they seen that we have missed?

The aim of the session isn’t necessarily to win the argument, or to beat our opponents into submission with our force of will, but to examine our thinking and the thinking of our colleagues. Where might have we missed a vital piece of information, made an incorrect assumption, or incorrectly linked some things?

Like the software that we write, our thought processes and conclusions are a series of connected pieces of logic, and it definitely contains some bugs that we wrote.

XP Manchester 110 – ROI and refactoring

This month we’ll be learning about how to get the most bang for your buck when deciding which areas of a code base to improve.

Doors open at 6.30 to start at 7. This is a practical session so bring a laptop.

Tickets available here.