In this eXperience Agile newsletter:

• new course: eXperience Refactoring, Eindhoven, March 4 and 5
• next eXperience Agile course, Eindhoven, 25 – 27 February
• New facilitator: Marc Evers
• Agile2008 conference
• Beyond Agile @ QCon London

New course: eXperience Refactoring

eXperience Agile participants and customers have been asking us for a Refactoring course. We usually cover Refactoring by showing and doing Test Driven Development, where Refactoring is a natural step. Our new eXperience Refactoring course will cover refactoring in more challenging situations, for example when there is a bulk of legacy code, or the team has been cutting corners for a while. This course prepares participants to stay vigilant in good times, and resolved and focused in bad times.

We will run the first public course eXperience Refactoring, March 4 and 5, near Eindhoven. We want to do trial runs in February, contact us if you are interested.

Next eXperience Agile

We will run another eXperience Agile near Eindhoven, 25 through 27 February and plan to publish an extended course schedule for the rest of the year soon. Yesterday’s weather says eXperience Agile runs about every two months, so we plan to run instances near the end of April and June as well.

New facilitator: Marc Evers

Rob and Willem are pleased to announce that Marc Evers has joined eXperience Agile as a facilitator. We have both worked with Marc on community events and workshops, and now that he has founded his own company Piecemeal Growth, we look forward to working with him in other capacities. Currently he is helping us get eXperience Refactoring off the ground.

Agile2008 conference

Send your experience reports to agile2008 , the largest international conference on Agile Software Development in Toronto. There is a stage for ‘breaking acts’, to support new presenters and/or new topics, so what are you waiting for?

Beyond Agile @ QCon London

Marc and I have been invited to present Beyond Agile at the QCon conference in London in March, which is a further development of the People vs. Process session we ran at XP Days Benelux and London. We will present six cultural patterns of software development organisations. For each pattern, we show when it is effective and when it goes awry. We will also show how e.g. Scrum and XP fit in, while explaining some common agile failure modes.