Joe began writing software in the late ’90s at a large insurance company. He soon moved to Evant, a start-up which became an early case study for eXtreme Programming and Agile software development processes. After spending several years as a consultant, Joe joined Pivotal Labs in 2005 as a founding members of Pivotal’s Ruby on Rails practice. Joe has led projects for a wide variety of clients, from one-person start-ups to the world’s largest social networks and search companies. Since moving to Atlanta in 2010 Joe has pair programmed remotely full time with Pivotal Labs coworkers and clients around the country. He also blogs about his his passion, remote pair programming, at http://remotepairprogramming.com.
Remote pair programming is surprisingly simple and inexpensive to implement, but it’s not just about bleeding-edge technology — a good attitude is just as important as good technology. Joe will walk you through how your distributed team can successfully implement remote pair programming, allowing you to realize the same benefits as in-person pairing and address some of the challenges of distributed development. Joe will discuss the important personal and interpersonal skills needed for remote pairing as well as the technology.
Distributed agile teams need not forgo the valuable discipline of pair programming. Thanks to ubiquitous high speed internet service, major advances in online collaboration technologies, and the need to source talent wherever they might be, remote pair programming is becoming more common.
Audience: All members of software development teams who are interested in pair programming and distributed agile will benefit from this session. Developers will learn the nuts-and-bolts of remote pairing, product managers, business experts, etc. will learn how to integrate remote pairing developers seamlessly with the team. Attendees are invited to share their own remote collaboration experiences — good and bad.
It’s an uncomfortable feeling: you read a news article describing clandestine organization cells, distributed networks of small teams which are nearly completely unaffected by each other’s operations yet united in their goals and beliefs. Their flat hierarchies mean the loss of one team member, even a leader, has little effect on the cell. The organization’s recruiting techniques focus on identifying disenfranchised yet influential individuals, sympathetic to the cell’s cause, and incorporating them into the group after a thorough vetting process.
After reading this you say to yourself, “That’s where I work, and it’s awesome.”
Learn how running a 200-person (and growing) Agile/XP software consulting company is much like running a clandestine organization, and how your teams can take techniques often associated with negative actions and use them for the good of your projects.
