A whole new exciting world!

My second week in my second job has been slacking off a little with my teeny weeny brain getting taxed a lot(which is good,btw) trying to fit into the new shoes of "Agile Development - Pair programming - Refactoring - Domain driven design - Test Driven Development - Intent Revealing Code - design patterns - Stories - Standup Meetings". Very fascinating and nifty terms they are - and so are the methodologies and the work patterns up here in my job. Few things I noticed that makes me love this job cap-a-pie are

AGILE DEVELOPMENT
DESIGN PATTERNS
PAIR PROGRAMMING
REFACTORING
DOMAIN DRIVEN DESIGN
AMIABLE WORK SETUP
MAGNIFICIENT CALGARY DOWNTOWN

Deepthi Bollu cannot do a better job in explaining "XTREME PROGRAMMING" than Ron Jeffries. Once you have read what Ron has to say about extreme programming, I would only add to say that we follow each and every practice of xtreme programming. We have official team meetings in a closed room only to pull in ourselves when we feel we are swerving a little from the practices. So this should tell you how strictly we adhere to the principles of extreme programming.

To assert how XP is practised up here......
1) Our customers are on site.
2) Our requirements are expressed through stories - verbally
3) Our customers write acceptance tests
4) We code our tests before we write our code
5) We check in almost everyday - all your tests must pass for you to check in
6) We release frequently (daily to QA, monthly to the customer)
7) We do small slices of functionalty from end to end8.We have a product backlog
9) Our architecture and design is evolving
10) We haven't got one class or component called "Framework"
11) We have no single person who gloats themselves as specialists - ONLY general contributors! The collective code ownership, knowledge transfer is practised rigorously which gives me my 101 reason to love my job.
12)Stand up meetings: we don't book a room on intranet to setup a meeting. We have status meetings everyday which really helps you to stay focused, responsible and accountable. Nevertheless, all our meetings are mere standups at our respective work stations, more like a round table, everyday at 8.50AM, talking about yesterday's work, learnings, today's strategy and announcements. It is quick and very effective way, I believe.

DESIGN PATTERNS

Martin Fowler, the chief scientist at Thoughtworks is the deity.
Some of his ingenuously designed patterns we follow are
- Facade
- DTOs
- MVC
- Snapshot Pattern
- Domain Model Pattern
(We are strong proponents of intent revealing code and hence the long names of our methods,objects,variables and all and this eliminates the need to documentation. On the same lines, Joe was telling me that the reason we didn't resort to Java docs was to make the team spend more time on writing code than on updating the ever evolving classes' documentation in java docs.)

PAIR PROGRAMMING

Here's an interesting article on "The bliss and bane of pair programming". We had an interesting discussion the other day on Pair Programming - a consequence of the tech leads blaming that our team ain't pairing up to the expectations.
My cut on Pair Programming

• Wonderful to implement the collective code ownership.
• Works splendidly when the pairs are on par. ->Augments Productivity astonishingly
• Enhances the Code quality with two pairs of eyes working on the code.
• Not advisable on an everyday basis - doesn't give time to contemplate
• Advisable for the partners to switch between the keyboards, since,The person typing thinks on tactical lines while the one watching more on strategic lines
• Not advisable 24/7 to newbies like me who can learn more by doing rather than watching.

FRIENDLY, VERY FRIENDLY SETUP

- Lunches
- Dual monitors
- Loonie bin
- Open Door..aah! Are there doors at all?
- Virus Checkers
- Team Leads mind setup

UTTERLY BEAUTIFUL AND ORGANISED IT IS....

The most conspicuous thing I noticed here in the downtown(for that matter in calgary) is that the culture overlaps with the culture I am brought up with---INDIAN, because canada being a commonwealth country follows the British Culture which influenced India's.

more in the evening when i get home..............