Wolf Pack Programming™

(hands-on agile programming evening)

Tuesday evening, November 23, 2010 – 18:15-21:30

Some of you might have already joined us back in May and June for the first Wolf Pack Programming sessions in the UK. Well, in conjunction with SPA and XTC, we're back... with the bugs fixed, the concept fine-tuned, and a brand new task. And to thank you for participating, we'll provide food during the workshop and pay for drinks afterwards.

Who should attend?

Anybody who wants to stretch their thinking about pair programming and continuous integration.

Join us if you are interested in thinking more deeply about pushing the boundaries of agile development and getting your hands dirty with object-oriented code for a few hours. No Smalltalk experience required.

What is Wolf Pack Programming?

Cloud computing is this year's hot topic. But what are the implications for agile application development? By moving the whole development environment to the cloud, we are no longer limited by the number of people who can comfortably fit around a single workstation; suddenly an entire team of programmers can work together on the same live code base. In this hands-on session, we experiment with a process inspired by the hunting strategies of wolves to see whether we can successfully take agile's much vaunted pair programming even further.

To facilitate the exercise, we will use a web-based development environment, which enables multiple people to jointly develop in a running Smalltalk image. The product, however, is merely an enabling tool; the focus of this evening is not on the technology but rather on the benefits and challenges of the "wolf pack" process itself. With all team members able to update the code simultaneously, integration is constant and the deployability status can be determined in real time. Will this make Continuous Integration Servers look slow or will it lead to disaster? To evaluate the effectiveness of this approach, we will ask our wolf packs to complete a series of tasks following the process.

Past "experiments" showed that the wolves considered this session very interesting and particularly fun.

What to bring?

Please bring a laptop and an open mind.

Where to meet?

BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT (formerly known as British Computer Society), is generously offering their London offices for this event (maps and directions). You must register in advance as you are required to sign in when entering the building. As seats are limited, please sign up and ensure your ticket upfront! If you find you cannot attend, please let us know.

Join us, become a wolf and work with other programmers in a shared live code base.