QCon is a practitioner-driven conference designed for technical team leads, architects, and project managers who influence software innovation in their teams.
Ben Lithgow Smith
Biography: Ben Lithgow Smith
Ben Lithgow Smith is an experienced software developer with a strong background in agile practices. Over the past 9 years he has held various academic and industrial posts, working on a number of EU IST research projects and delivering systems for supply chain management, equity trading, portfolio analytics and fixed income data management.Presentation: TweetThe monkeys and the fire hose: maintaining an XP team over 7 years
We represent three generations of the team that wrote and supports an internal bank system that has been releasing every fortnight for about seven years. Over that time, the team has almost completely changed, including several project managers, but has sustained its ability to deliver new features incrementally. Nowadays its long-term stability and effectiveness has earned the system senior-level support from the business. In this talk, we will try to figure out what made things work in the first place, and how we managed to avoid the system decaying into an unmaintainable ball of mud over all these years.