The XP Day Review Process

For the last few years XP Day has had an open review process. Anyone who submits a session also becomes a reviewer. Reviews are written on the website, are attributed and can be read by any other submitter/reviewer.

This year, this process had an interesting effect: people started reviewing sessions as soon as they appeared on the site, before the review phase started of the submission process started. This meant that the earlier a presenter submitted a proposal, the more time they had to improve it in response to the reviewers' feedback. Some really interesting sessions were invented on the website as reviewers and presenters bounced ideas back and forth.

Our review process accidentally stumbled onto an essential aspect of Agile software development: the earler you get feedback the more time you have to fix problems.

Maybe next year we shouldn't have a review phase at all. The submission deadline could be just before the meeting when the programme is put together. Presenters could submit as early (or as late) as they wished. The earlier they submitted the more feedback they would get, the more they could improve their submission, and the more they could be involved in the review process. The later they submitted the less feedback they would get but also the less reviews they would be able to write, which would count against their submission.

European XP Days

This year XP Day is bigger and better than ever before. There are now six (count 'em!) tracks of sessions, which has allowed the conference to both grow a little larger and have more focused sessions.

I will be running an introductory tutorial with Romilly Cocking and Steve Freeman on Test-Driven Development with JUnit and jMock 2. Although introductory, the tutorial will go beyond the basics and explain how use TDD to guide object-oriented design and how to recognise and avoid common misuses of TDD and mock objects.

I will also be at XP Day Benelux where I will be running a tutorial with Steve Freeman on "Sustainable Test Driven Development". This is a more advanced, hands-on, experiential tutorial that shows how to write tests that are easy to read and so clearly explain what a codebase does and why.

XP Day always sells out early, so if you want to attend you'd better book soon.

Update: XP Day London has now sold out. However, if you want to attend you can join our waiting list to be informed if a place becomes available.