Jason Ayers
With 20 years working with Smalltalk and Agile techniques, Jason currently looks after the Smalltalk business in Europe and Africa for Cincom.
Track abstract - Room G4 - Cloud computing and Service Oriented Architecture
At the Extremities of Extreme: How to achieve continuous integration, continuous testing and real-time collaboration within the cloud
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 an entire team of programmers can work together on the same live code base. But it is not enough to have access to the code or even the running application; to get a dispersed team to collaborate effectively you need more than a shared repository. Getting real collaboration, similar to putting everyone in the same room, is a significant challenge and today’s tools are surprisingly limited.
Cincom has run a number of highly distributed development teams for the last ten years. Recently we have been working on a process called Wolf Pack Programming™, exploring how development teams can collaborate more closely and how this collaboration might be brought into a distributed model. We have run a series of workshops using this process and have a range of interesting findings about pair programming, team collaboration in a single code space, continuous integration and continuous testing. In this experience report, we will discuss our observations as well as our current thinking on what might be needed to make cloud-based collaboration as effective as co-location.
