One approach to transitioning development teams to Extreme Programming (XP) is to first transition the programming staff completely. The XP Programmer Team Week gets a big jump on that process by immersing an on-site team of programmers in all of the XP programmer practices:

One Team: Everybody works closely together in an open space.

Pair Programming: Every line of code is written by two programmers at one computer.

Shared Codebase: All of the code is available to all of the team. No person or pair owns code.

Continuous Integration: Pairs commit defect-free code back to the repository several times per day.

Test-driven Development: Programmers use test-first to drive simple design, and to support refactoring.

Refactoring Ruthlessly: Programmers clarify and simplify the code as they go, whenever the tests all run clean.

This exercise does not use user stories, the Planning Game, iteration metrics, constant customer communication, or other XP customer-facing practices. The focus is entirely on programmer practices and programmer interaction.

A non-agile team of programmers using the XP programmer practices together for an entire week experiences new levels of team cohesion, productivity, code quality, order, knowledge exchange, and pride in their work. The goal is for participants to 'fall in love' with this new way of working, becoming reluctant to go back to the old way.

Management can witness these new levels of productivity and increased morale for themselves, simply by hanging around in the work area. The momentum from the exercise carries over into overall organizational commitment to go Agile.

Preparation and setup for the XP Programmer Team Week are critical. On Day One of the exercise, the team of programmers must be able to drop right into a completely prepared environment, ready to go.

We therefore provide a prepared example codebase, requirements, and technical tasks. For off-site versions of the course, we also provide the physical space and prepared workstations. For on-site version of this course, Adaption and/or client staff spend between one and two days beforehand preparing them. Specifically, the course requires:

· Physical space: A team-friendly workspace, including pair-friendly workstation arrangements, and access to lots of whiteboard space.

· Software infrastructure: Each workstation needs full installations of a refactoring IDE, JUnit; a build system; code repository access; etc.

Note: Course contents are subject to improvement without notice. :-)