November 25-26 2010

Heeze, The Netherlands

The Belgian and Dutch XP/Agile user groups and Agile Systems vzw organize a two day conference on November 25th and 26th 2010 in Heeze, near Eindhoven, The Netherlands.

Topics of the conference

• Agile - crossing the chasm?
• Transitioning to an agile process
• Agile project management
• Continuous process improvement
• Beyond agile
• Responding to change vs. long term planning
• The economics of agile software development
• Contracts for agile software projects
• Thinking tools, e.g. systems thinking, Cynefin, theory of constraints, lean development
• Changing yourself and your organization
• Tools and technology supporting agile
• Agile method engineering
• Your session. The call for sessions is open until July 15th

XP sites:

• Ron Jeffries' Extreme Programming Site
• Don Wells' Extreme Programming Site
• Ward Cunningham's wiki
• William Wake's XP site
• Martin Fowler
• Object Mentor
• JUnit
• Pair Programming
• John Brewer's XP FAQ
• RoleModel Software: XP explained in a few seconds
• Sven Gorts' and Philippe T'Seyen's Refactoring site, home of the "Refactoring thumbnails".

Xp in other countries:

• The Netherlands
• United Kingdom
• Switzerland (french speaking)
• France
• Luxembourg new!!!

Other Agile Processes:

• Agile Alliance
• Agile Alliance Europe
• Cutter Consortium
• SCRUM
• Crystal methodologies
• Lean Development

and more:

• Articles about XP and other software topics
• More links....

Subscribe to Belgian extreme programming mailing list

Subscribe to International extreme programming mailing list

Subscribe to Dutch extreme programming mailing list

Future meetings will be announced here and on the mailinglist and the wiki.

XP BE MailingList

You can subscribe to the XP BE mailing list to discuss all things related to the use of XP in Belgium.

Lots of interesting stuff, and lots of fun guaranteed!

XP BE Meetings

Meeting 31: 06/11/2008

Thursday, November 6th 2008 User group meeting hosted by Ultragenda. Session - "We suck less! Is not enough." by Robin Dymond Register here.

Meeting 30: 16/10/2008

Thursday, October 16th 2008 User group meeting hosted by Mediamine. Session - "Is your team within the comfort zone of Scrum?" by Vladimir Blagojevic and "One year of introducing Agile in a large organisation" by Didier Blanjean and Jan Verstrepen

Meeting 29: 13/08/2008

User group meeting hosted by Cap Gemini in Diegem on Wednesday August 13th, 2008. Subject: The Business Value Game

Meeting 28: 26/06/2008

User group meeting hosted by AGFA near Ghent on Thursday June 26th, 2008. Subject: Scrum at Agfa Gevaert

Meeting 27: 10/12/2007

User group meeting hosted by Javapolis in Antwerpen on Monday December 10th, 2007. The subject of the meeting wass "Building a high trust culture in your Software Engineering Organisation", presented by David Anderson. Read more...

Meeting 26: 18/10/2007

User group meeting hosted by Allors in Mechelen on Thursday October 18th, 2007. The subject of the meeting is "Presenting: Multiple Type Declarations". More...

Meeting 25: 23/05/2007

User group meeting hosted by Cegeka in Haasrode on Wednesday May 23rd, 2007. The subject of the meeting is "Customer collaboration and the Proxy Customer". Register for the meeting...

Meeting 24: 28/02/2007

User group meeting hosted by WTCM in Brussels on Wednesday February 28th, 2007. The subject of the meeting is "Scaling agile". More info...

Meeting 23: 03/11/2006

User group meeting hosted by XPlore in Grimbergen on Friday November 3rd, 2006. We will do a tryout of the "Help mijn team is in oorlog!" session that Yves and Ignace Hanoulle will host at XP Days Benelux. Register for the meeting...

Meeting 22: 16/03/2006

User group meeting hosted by InfoSupport in Mechelen on Thursday March 16th, 2006. The topic is "Microsoft Team System and MSF for Agile".. More about the meeting...

Meeting 21: 07/02/2006

User group meeting hosted by ERG in Zaventem on Thursday February 7th, 2006. The topic is Management Metrics. Register for the meeting...

Meeting 20: 20/09/2005

The meeting was hosted by Emc in Mechelen The topic was Agile Planning and Tracking

Meeting 19: 22/02/2005

This meeting was hosted by Prosource in Mechelen, on February 22nd, 2005. The topic of the meeting was "The Theory of Constraints"

Meeting 18: 21/12/2004

This meeting was hosted by Federal Administration of Foreign Affairs in Brussels, on December 21st, 2004. The topic of the meeting was "Unit Tests as Documentation" More info on the WIKI site.

Meeting 17: 26/10/2004

Nayima

The meeting was hosted by Tryx and Nayima in Leuven, on October 26, 2004. During the meeting Willem van den Ende and Marc Evers will introduce Systems Thinking with games and simulations. More info on the WIKI site.

Meeting 16: 22/06/2004

This meeting was hosted by DATA4S on June 22, 2004. Topic was the XP Game! More info on the WIKI site.

Meeting 15: 26/04/2004

This meeting was hosted by Egova on April 26, 2004. Topic is "Experiences in moving towards an XP process". More info and registration on the WIKI site.

Meeting 14: 01/03/2004

This meeting was hosted by Microsoft on March 1st, 2004. Topic was "XP in a Microsoft environment". More info on the WIKI site.

Meeting 13: 20/01/2004

This meeting was hosted by AviaPartner on January 20th, 2004. Topic was "The effect of short(ening) releases". More info on the WIKI site.

Meeting 12: 03/11/2003

This meeting was be hosted by Ictinos on November 3rd, 2003. The topic of the meeting was Unit Testing. More info on the WIKI site.

Meeting 11: 03/09/2003

This meeting was hosted on Wednesday September 3rd by EMC BDG in Mechelen. Read more about it on our WIKI site. The topic was Pair Programming and the announcement of the program of the XP DAY Benelux conference!

Meeting 10: 16/06/2003

This meeting was held on Monday June 16th 2003, hosted by Cronos. Read more about it on our WIKI site. The XP BE users group is two years old. Happy birthday!

Meeting 9: 30/04/2003

This meeting was held on Wednesday April 30th 2003, hosted by EDS. Read more about it on our WIKI site.

Meeting 8: 20/02/2003

This meeting was held on Thursday February 20th 2003, hosted by University of Antwerp. Read more about it on our WIKI site.

Meeting 7: 17/12/2002

This joint meeting with the Dutch XP Group was hosted by Philips Research, on Tuesday, December 17th. More info on the WIKI site.

Meeting 6: 16/9/2002

The meeting was hosted by Lesire Software Engineering, on monday, September 16th. More info on the WIKI site.

Meeting 5: 01/7/2002

Nayima

The meeting was hosted by Tryx and Nayima in "The Lunatic" cafe in Leuven on Monday, July 1st. See the WIKI site.

Meeting 4: 4/3/2002

The fourth meeting was hosted at Europeloan Bank on Monday, March 4th. We dicussed the pros and cons of Pair Programming. For more info, see the WIKI site.

Meeting 3: 18/12/2001

The third XP.Be meeting had presentations and discussions about Acceptance Tests. See the WIKI site for some notes and further discussion on the subject.

Meeting 2: 14/09/2001

The second meeting was a very special one. We've invited the Dutch group to meet in Belgium this time. It was scheduled on a Friday, so that we didn't have to look at the time...

The subject was Continuous Integration. Several people explained how this is done in their company.

Everyone can add his comments about the meeting on the WIKI site..

Meeting 1: 21/06/2001

The first meeting was a great success with 22 participants.

You can find more info on what has been discussed in the meeting on the WIKI site.

Agile teams want to deliver maximum business value. That's easy if the Onsite Customer assigns business value to each story. But how does the Customer do that? How can you estimate business value?

How do you decide between stories? How do you decide between projects? How do you decide between clients?

This game gives you some simple business value estimation techniques that are "good enough" for everyday use.

Teams of 'businesspeople' have to make plans for their development team. The goal of the game is to earn as much money as possible. This game is a complement to the XP Game: how do these 'business value points" on the XP Game story cards get chosen?

We provide the clients and their wishes. We suggest the techniques to estimate business value.

The rest is up to you.

Want to play the game?

NEW: version 2.0

• Download the game instructions and materials in English (approx 3 Mb)
• Download the game instructions and materials in French (approx 3 Mb)
• New: Download the game instructions and materials in Spanish (approx 4 Mb)

• More Requests
• Clarified score sheet
• More process improvement options
• Pictures for accountant and development team

• Portia Tung for help in designing and testing the game
• Laurent Morisseau for help with the French translation
• Juan Gutiérrez Plaza for translating the game into Spanish. Thanks to Leo Antolí and Thomas Wallet for reviewing this translation

Download the game instructions and materials (approx 3.5 Mb)

The Business Value Game by Vera Peeters and Pascal Van Cauwenberghe is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Belgium License.

Client pictures made with "South Park Studio" by Janina Köppel

• The new Business Value Game v1.1 has been released

DOWNLOAD The XP Game v5.0

The package contains a detailed manual and a ready-to-print set of cards and score-sheets. Total size of the ZIPped file is about 2.8MB.

Everything you need is in the download, just add balloons, cards, dice, hourglasses, pens, fun and some people who want to learn and have fun.

"The XP Game explained", a chapter from Extreme Programming Perspectives, explains more about the reasoning behind the different elements of the XP Game. This text is now included in the XP Game download package.

The XP Game by Vera Peeters and Pascal Van Cauwenberghe is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Belgium License.

Hope you enjoy it!

We would appreciate it if you would fill out the evaluation form after you've played it. It will help us to improve the game.

We are proud to present you the new version 5.0 of the XP Game (released July 10th 2008)

What's new?

• A new rule to encourgae correct planning from the second round on:
  • Planned but not implemented stories carry a penalty
  • Stories implemented but not planned are only worth half their business value
• Game description and velocity discussion have been updated with feedback from the simulation and "live" XP projects
• The debriefing questions and discussion have been enhanced, as this is the point where participants really get value out of the simulation.
• The game manual describes more of the reasoning behind the elements of the simulation, based on the "XP Game Explained" paper we wrote for the "Extreme Programing Perspectives" book. The "XP Game Explained" paper is now included in the download or can be downloaded separately.
• A new portable HTML-based presentation, game timer and score sheet
• An example timetable gives you some idea of the time to allocate to explaining, playing and discussing the simulation.

Check it out

You can get everything you need to play the game at your company in the download center.

Well, at least you can get the manual, the cards, the card wraps, the score sheets, the coach guidelines, the customer/developer responsibility sheet, the presentation, the folding papers.

You still have to print them yourself, of course.

And, I'm really very sorry, but I didn't find a way to let you download the playing cards, the hourglass, the dice, the balloons, the bags, the pencils, ....

If you want to, we can organize this game in your company. Contact us at info]]> pvc 15 September 2007 20:01 GMT http://www.xp.be/events.html http://www.xp.be/events.html User Group meetings and the Pair Programming Parties.

• European Summer School on Agile Programming (ESSAP) (Varese, IT)
• Noordelijke Agile Groep (Heerenveen - NL),
• Benelux XPDay 2005 (Rotterdam - NL),
• XP2005 (Sheffield - UK),
• Agile Open 2005 (Mechelen - BE),
• German XPDay 2004 (Karlsruhe - DE),
• London XPDay 2004 (London - UK),
• Belgian XP Meeting (Haasrode - BE),
• xp2004 (Garmisch-Partenkirchen - DE),
• London XPDay 2003 (London - UK),
• OT2002 (Oxford - UK),
• XP Universe 2001 (Raleigh - USA),
• XP2001 (Cagliari - IT),
• Dutch XP User Group Meeting (Amersfoort - NL).

XPUniverse

The XP-game was played at XPUniverse 2001, a conference for learning and sharing about agile software development processes, in Raleigh, North Carolina, from 23 to 25 July 2001.

Don Wells, Program Chair of the XPUniverse conference: "I played the XP Game at XP Universe. It was fun, which is a major benefit, and it accurately portrays how iteration planning works in Extreme Programming. It is different from the traditional Extreme Hour. First, it allows all the people involved to experience iteration planning from the point of view of both customer and developer. This makes it very suitable for use with groups of customers, developers or any mixture of both. Second, it has the user stories created in advance in a well defined and easy to understand and perform way. This shifts the focus of the game to planning and how that works within XP. This is a great way to introduce iteration planning XP style."

XP2001

The XP-game featured on the agenda of XP2001, the Extreme Programming's annual conference in Cagliari, Italy, from 20 to 23 May 2001.

Michele Marchesi, Program Chair of the conference: "The XP game was an exciting experience. It is fun and you can understand how the Planning Game of XP works. My only suggestion is to divide players in developers (who estimate the stories and "implement" them) and users (who choose the stories to implement), since the division of tasks among users and developers is of paramount importance in XP. In any case, it was a pleasant and interesting experience, which should be played in every XP course."

Ron Jeffries: "I played the XP game at XP2001. It's a lot of fun and gives a fair sense of how XP goes. But the coach wouldn't let us work even one second of overtime, which is too Extreme for me, and cost us the game. And he wouldn't let us do spikes, either, which caused us to try to build a house of cards, thinking we actually had a chance. But the best part was the balloons!"

Philips

Philips approached Vera Peeters and Pascal Van Cauwenberghe to present the XP-game at the Philips Software Conference 2001, attended by 530 Philips staff members in Eindhoven, the Netherlands on 8 and 9 February 2001. Philips staff-members who played the XP-game, responded enthusiastically. Erik Bos, who organised the XP-game session for Philips, comments: "The participants developed a clear understanding of XP. Also, we had a lot of fun doing this hands-on game!"

SERC

The game also featured at SERC, the Software Engineering Research Centre, based in Utrecht, the Netherlands. SERC was founded in 1987 as a knowledge centre to improve software engineering in the Netherlands. Erik Groeneveld, SERC advisor, testifies: "We have played the game several times in different circumstances. It turns out to be an effective instrument to teach people the XP planning process."

• the planning game?
• velocity?
• story estimation?
• short releases?
• making predictable plans?
• how to explain these things in your company?

Want to...

• play the planning game? (...but maybe in another role)
• feel the velocity of your team?
• see it work?
• let both business people and developers experience it?
• have fun?

The XP Game is a playful way to familiarize the players with some of the more difficult concepts of the XP Planning Game, like velocity, story estimation, yesterday’s weather and the cycle of life. Anyone can participate. The goal is to make development and business people work together, they both play both roles. It’s especially useful when a company starts adopting XP.

Want to know more?

Then you're ready to go to the detailed description. Or, if you want to, you can go immediately to the download center. Did you already play it? Enter all your feedback in the evaluation form. Read testimonials of people who played it.

The XP Game is developed by Vera Peeters (Tryx) and Pascal Van Cauwenberghe (Nayima).

Feedback? Questions? Need help organizing the game? Contact us: info

We would like give our special thanks to the following people. Without them, the game would not be what it is now.

• Thanks to those who played it at XP Days in London and Germany, Belgian XP group and everywhere around the world. Thank you for the fun and feedback.
• Peter Wijntjens from Lead for feedback and pushing us to release.
• David Grietens and Koen De Hondt who coached at XP Universe 2001.
• Gerard Meszaros of ClearStream consulting who made us think about what we were trying to teach.
• Martine Verluyten, Willem van den Ende, Filip Lambrechts and Tammo Freese who coached at XP2001.
• Sandra Uytterhoeven, Bart De Man, Toon Nevelsteen, Kurt Hoydonckx, Pieter Cooreman, Jimmy Swiggers, Astrid Bormans, Karl Jamaels, Martine Verluyten, Philippe Guislain, Thomas Vanderick, Bart Verbruggen, Johan Vanaken and Sabrina Bonneux who sent us some excellent feedback that helped us to improve the game.
• Erik Groeneveld, Willem van den Ende, and Erik Bos, who gave us really useful tips and tricks after organizing the game themselves.
• Erik Bos again, Andrew Holle, Bart De Greef, who translated the original cards in English.

Agile Open Conference

27-28 April, 2006

Mechelen, Belgium

Agile Systems vzw organizes a two day Agile Open conference, an international open space conference on agile software development.

The conference site contains more info.]]> pvc 29 December 2005 18:01 GMT http://www.xp.be/xpgame/description.html http://www.xp.be/xpgame/description.html Summary

The XP Game is a playful way to familiarize the players with some of the more difficult concepts of the XP Planning Game, like velocity, story estimation, yesterday's weather and the cycle of life. Anyone can participate. The goal is to make development and business people work together in 1 team. Both will have the experience of performing the other role. It's especially useful when a company starts adopting XP.

Outline

In real life Planning Game, development and business people are sitting on opposite sides of the table. Both participate, but in different roles. The XP Game makes the players switch between developer and customer roles, so that they understand each other's behaviour very well.

Some of the concepts in the Planning Game are difficult to grasp, for developers and for customers. This XP Game is a practical way to demonstrate how the rules of the XP Planning Game make up an environment in which it becomes possible to make predictable plans. After all, the easiest way to get a feeling for the way it works is to experience it.

It differs from the classical Mousetrap or Coffeemaker Game in several ways:

• The developers and the customers are not separated. Everybody get to play the developer and customer role.
• The stories are really very simply, everybody will understand them,
• but they're also very concrete.
• We do a real implementation, with real, unambiguous acceptance tests,
• but not a bit technical!!! (I guess everybody can inflate a balloon...)
• There's a small element of competition in it that makes it a really fun game to play.

Addressed concepts: velocity, planning game, estimation, and how to explain these concepts in a clear way to all participants in the XP process.

Detailed description

• Game props
• First iteration
• Second iteration
• Game ending

Debriefing

At this point, you can ask the participants some questions to reflect on what happened.

Developers estimate stories

The team receives 7 more story cards to estimate. This time, the coach must stress that the estimations be done by comparing with the cost estimates of the previously implemented stories.

Customers choose stories

The team must choose stories for a total estimated number of points equal to the team velocity.

Developers implement stories

The stories are implemented one by one, until the hourglass is empty (the fixed length of an iteration).

The stories, estimates and business value earned are added to the score sheets. The sum of the estimates of the implemented stories is the new velocity.

Further iterations can be done, each time selecting stories with the total estimate equal to the team velocity measured during the previous iteration.

Game variation

To give the game a more "real world" sense, the game master may decide at the end of an iteration that "the specifications have changed". All stories written on cards of a certain color have no business value at all. This change retroactively applies to stories that have been implemented!]]> pascal 26 May 2005 19:05 GMT http://www.xp.be/xpgame/description/iteration1.html http://www.xp.be/xpgame/description/iteration1.html

Iteration 1

Customers write stories

Each team receives 12 story cards. Each card contains the following:

• Story description. The stories are simple little games. No technical knowledge is required.
• Story value in "business points". The aim of the game is to earn as much business points as possible.
• Estimate: 1/2/3/4/5/6 points or impossible

Developers estimate stories

The team estimates how long the story will take to implement. They must choose one of 1-2-3-4-5-6 points or "this is too big to estimate". The team may ask the coach questions about the story. The coach should suggest that estimates be done by sorting and comparing stories by complexity. E.g. if a story is twice as difficult as another, estimate twice the number of points.

Customers choose stories

The team selects stories they guess they can implement in 180 seconds (the real-time length of the iteration). The team must maximize the number of business points to earn by implementing the stories.

The team orders the stories for implementation. All the stories must be "implemented" sequentially in this order.

Developers implement stories

The stories are taken one by one. Team members volunteer to implement the story. Before implementation, the team may hold a short discussion on how best to implement the story. The team may ask the coach questions about implementation and acceptance conditions.

When a developer starts the implementation of a story the hourglass is started. The hourglass is stopped when the story is finished and accepted by the coach. The business points of the story are earned.

The iteration continues until the hourglass is empty. If all the selected stories have been implemented before that happens, the team may select more stories for implementation.

At the end of the iteration, the score sheet contains the stories, estimated time and business points earned. The business points are summed. The sum of the cost points of the implemented stories is the velocity.]]> pascal 02 April 2005 18:44 GMT http://www.xp.be/papers.html http://www.xp.be/papers.html Papers

"It's a fine line between chatting and pair programming" by Pascal Van Cauwenberghe
A short story about a pair programming episode. It can be hard to see the difference between two programmers chatting or pair programming, if you don't look closely. You don't have to look closely, you have to look at the result.

"Agile Fixed Price Projects" by Pascal Van Cauwenberghe

A two-part article that describes how you can introduce agile techniques into "fixed price" contracts to increase your chances of success and customer happiness.

"The XP Game explained", by Vera Peeters and Pascal Van Cauwenberghe This chapter from Extreme Programming Perspectives explains more about the reasoning behind the different elements of the XP Game. "Refactoring or upfront design?", by Pascal Van Cauwenberghe This chapter from Extreme Programming Perspectives is an update of the paper presented at XP 2001 conference.

"Rock Climbing and Extreme Programming" by Ye Yongqing.
The author discovers that most of the ideas of extreme programming are quite suitable to rock climbing.

"Simple design and unit testing with Enterprise Javabeans: the Box Metaphor" by Vera Peeters. Presented at XP2001.
A metaphor to guide you in designing simple, consistent and testable EJB systems.

"A great challenge: XP in a typical dot-com"

by Ye Yonqing and Winston Wolff. Presented at XP2001.
This paper describes the implementation of XP in a young, dynamic, growing global web bank and an environment with rapid changing user requirements.

Books

The Systems Thinking wiki has a list of books on XP, Agile software development, teams, people, Theory of Constraints, Lean Thinking... Enough interesting material there to keep you occupied for years!

Laurent Bossavit's Bookshelved wiki contains reviews of many of those books and many more.

• Let developers and customers experience both sides of the planning game
• Explain velocity
• Show how you can quickly learn to make predictable plans

Players

• Teams of 5-8 technical and non-technical people
• 1 coach per team, to answer questions, explain rules, keep scores. Coaches should be familiar with the concept of velocity.
• 1 game master to explain and lead the game.

Props

• Pre-filled story cards
• Slide presentation explaining the steps, aims and meaning of the game
• Planning and scoring sheets, pencil
• Playing cards, dice, balloons, other small props to perform stories.
• Hourglass per team