Wolf Pack Programming™

Abstract

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 and entire team of programmers can work together on the same live code base. In this hands-on workshop, we will borrow from 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 cloud-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 the workshop is not on the technology but rather on the benefits and challenges of the 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.

Knowledge of Smalltalk is not required but participants should bring a laptop or be willing to pair up. The only software requirement is a copy of Firefox or willingness to install it.

Speaker

Julian Fitzell, Helge Nowak