NCR Agile Users Group (NAUG) Knowledge Evening

Yesterday we had a the second NAUG knowledge evening conference at a superb venue arranged by Dr. A.K. Yadav @ Ansal Institute of Technology.

We had a session on Extreme programming which I presented and another one by Rama Krishna(RK) on his experiences with Tech Mahindra on their adoption path of Extreme Programming and Agile. It was very enlightening to hear about the XP adoption story with the hurdles that were faced and what was done to overcome them.

I was really impressed by the way in which some companies are serious about XP and the way they have adopted it to the core. As always there was deep discussion on the merits and demerits of pair programming. Rama Krishna vouched by the fact that Pair programming has given them heavy benefits and he used the statement that in their team when people are pairing 1+1 <> 2 but 1+1 = 11. I personally cannot agree more.

Another interesting visible info that RKs team maintains is a pairing matrix. They have 2 pairing sessions a day. One in the morning and another in the afternoon. The pairing matrix looks something like this

This way the team can make sure that there is adequate rotation of pairs happening and how many times a pairing happens between the primary member (who owns the story) and secondary member (who helps the primary member with the story). Of course the secondary member might be primary on a separate story.

Very interesting and innovative indeed.

You can access the presentations here

Introduction to eXtreme Programming

Agile Experiences

For the NAUG knowledge evening, we had representations from Tech Mahindra, NCR Corporation, Xebia and AIT. Though we were expecting more industry representation and people from many more companies had confirmed their presence however they could not make it. We missed you and hopefully you would be able to make it for the next session.