CultureClash

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CultureClash

Various issues were identified as being likely when rolling two development teams together during a merger. Here's the list - I've marked the ones that didn't occur:

• Personnel

• clannishness (didn't occur)
• egos (didn't occur)
• uncertainty in decisions
• pay and location

• Technical

• h/w,tools,licences
• deploying builds
• no tests
• inherited requirements

• Project Management

• organising multiple projects
• synchronising
• who are the project managers

• Cultural

• dev-centric vs. sales-centric
• personal vs. group space (didn't occur)
• interrupts vs. closed/focused group
• willingness to own (didn't occur)

Comments:

The session included some discussion about how you can introduce XP to a new team - the key point being that XP-savvy developers make great evangelists for spreading the techniques to the non-XP side, and pair-programming works faster than anything to make a team gel.

For some, the session title was a bit misleading. The events described didn't really involve a mixture of waterfall and XP techniques, because the earlier non-agile approach wasn't really waterfall - it was ad-hoc code-and-test. And it hadn't been very successful, so the move to an XP process for the whole team was unopposed.

It might have been interesting to describe a situation where a successful and happy waterfall process (some people claimed to have seen such a thing) was combined with an XP process..

And for some others, the session hopefully provided an update on what happened to the XP team that they had worked in previously (or, indeed, had set up previously).