AndXP: A Femnist XP Unconference Write-up
It started with Lillie’s tweet after I wrote a post about 3rd wave feminism and XP.
Feminism and XP are two words I began linking together because they both define the shape of my life in very significant ways yet I couldn’t find any existing writing about them. Although such missing links can be frustrating, when I find them, I see a blank canvas stretching before me.
Rather than painting in this canvas on my own, my belief is that this link of feminism and XP is much more suited to a community mural much like the vibrant murals decorating the Mission neighborhood of my home town, San Francisco.
Together, Lillie and I organized a one day unconference of XP here in San Francisco, AndXP.
At AndXP, our group of artists assembled at the Omada Healthcare offices at 8:30am on a Saturday to begin painting in our own community picture of XP, Feminism and Inclusivity. Between 30–40 people attended. Below you’ll find some of the lessons I gathered. I hope others will post their learnings as well.
Unconference Style
To keep the organizing overhead low and to maximize the power of different types of voices, Lillie and I chose an unconference style. At an unconference, there is no pre-set agenda. Attendees show up with their ideas for topics, put them on a wall and vote on the session ideas they like the most.
After everyone voted, we had Valerie Aurora of Frameshift Consulting present to the attendees about how to have effective discussions in their sessions. This is a great way to level-set attendees knowledge about how to discuss something together in a way that allows everyone to have a voice.
Part of this strategy includes having attendees fill in a few different roles in each session. We had timekeeper, facilitator, note-taker and most importantly, gatekeeper. The gatekeeper’s job was to watch for anyone contributing more to the discussion with others. If you’d like to try these roles in your meeting, there are some handy templates available at the Frameshift website.
We ended up with some great notes from most of the sessions which we linked together in a doc we called our Commons Doc. The name was Lillie’s idea and I really like this iteration on the idea of a wiki but using Google docs. I’m not linking to it here because it is for the attendees. We drew this boundary around the notes so that people would feel safer sharing their stories with each other.
The end result was that our group found a way to let everyone present have their say in the discussions.
Pair Programming
We talked so much about pair programming: different styles of pairing, limits of pairing, how to be a more inclusive pair. In our discussions it became obvious that there is more work to do in the area of understanding pair programming and micro-aggressions and that this makes pair programming harder for anyone in an under-represented group.
It is really easy to get walked all over by someone who is not necessarily a jerk but who deals out bad behavior in the form of tiny micro-aggressions that add up. Because of the nature of micro-aggressions and because it is already tricky, dangerous and often ill-advised for someone in an under-represented group to report micro-aggressive behavior, this is currently a problem for pairing.
Who fixes this? At a daily, personal level, this one is on whoever, in a pair, has more privilege. Most often, that will be straight, cis white men (or women) as there is already too much policing of how people in under-represented groups act and present at work. It is time for straight, cis, white men to do some policing of their own behavior and work on their micro-aggressions when they pair program. Check your privilege here.
At an org level, companies organizing with XP need to make an investment in bringing in a D&I consultant to help staff understand micro-aggressions and how to avoid them in pair programming situations.
The Dogma of XP
This topic kept coming up to the extent that we had an extra session about the dogmatic application of XP Practices. This is also what initially motivated Nicole Sullivan’s tweet storm. How much XP does a team really need? How does it feel to implement ALL of the practices?
At this point, I’ve seen the beauty of XP as a holistic system, but I’ve also seen how a dogmatic application can be hard on people to the point that they burn out, give up and quit.
If you read much of Kent Beck’s writing about how to apply XP, it’s easy to notice how there is an emphasis on a team taking care of each other and being empowered to change the way they adopt the practices, but more often, I’ve seen XP put in place by management that focuses mostly on keeping the practices going for the purpose of keeping the value chain moving.
There is a huge emphasis, in XP on getting as much value out of a team and in front of the customer as quickly as possible. While this is great for customer value, it can turn a workplace into a meat grinder with little to no slack in the 40 hours of the workweek.
In addition, because this is a highly collaborative process, everyone is in front of each other day after day but most XP workplaces don’t give employees much in the way of tools for learning how to be better teammates to each other. I’ve mostly seen this replaced with an emphasis on “be kind,” “be excellent to each other,” which I’ve come to refer to as the leave-the-kids-in-the-basement-they’ll-work-it-out approach so richly illustrated in the novel Lord of the Flies.
This is a great way to empower straight, white, cis dudes but not a good way to create an inclusive workplace.
Speaking of management, while I haven’t seen much written about feminism and XP, I also haven’t seen very much about managing XP teams either. XP is mature enough and widespread enough that this is its own important topic especially since the emphasis on collaboration means that the need for people skills and good management is even higher.
XP requires not good, but great management. This requires effective managers and team leads who can see when a tradeoff needs to be made and who value their team and are empowered enough to make that tradeoff. It takes managers who can sort out what is going on when a pair is not getting along or when a team is floundering with a goal.
Mix the power dynamics of privilege/race/gender into this already complicated equation and it is very easy for someone in an under-represented group to come up with the short end of the stick because management just can’t see the political nuance of what is in front of them.
The management of XP teams is not easy and it is at the center of this problem with dogma.
What made me happy was that there were actually a good number of XP managers at the conference who seem to be cultivating an awaremess of these factors. I also heard stories of tradeoffs being made at companies with even the most dogmatic of reputations. There is hope.
A radical idea for XP management: all of us in an under-represented group who have taken the time and effort to be better at collaboration just to fit in would probably make great team leads and managers. You should consider promoting/paying us more.
Slack Time vs. The Tracker Treadmill
As an off-shoot of the topic of dogma and XP, there was a lot of talk about how slack time works on an XP team. This mainly worked itself out into talking about slack for pair programming and talking about getting slack time away from the backlog.
I noticed that there was a lot of agreement that pair programming for 8 hours a day is a great way to burn people out. In fact, most people seemed to think 6 hours was enough pair programming in any one day.
In one session on Mindfulness and XP we were talking about how to fit meditation into a workday. It turns out that if you are pairing, it can be hard to leave your pair saying, “hey…I have to go meditate for 10 minutes.” What’s particularly interesting to me is that no one has ever had a problem telling me they need to take a break to play ping-pong.
Time away from a backlog was also mentioned as an important aspect of slack time on XP teams. I heard that at one company that has hired a lot of people from code schools, people receive 1 hour a day to delve into learning something. This seems like a great idea as I’ve found that if I really want what I’ve learned during a pairing session to stick in my brain, I need to have some period of time to learn and reflect on what I’ve done. I also heard mention that at consultancies, it helps if XP consultants are billed at less than 100% of their time. This gives people time to check their email and do any housekeeping tasks while they are actually at work.
The Name
This was the top voted topic for our sessions. Everyone hates the name Extreme Programming. What do we do?
I almost attended this session, but didn’t because I wanted to look at the notes later and see what names other people came up with. After the session, I heard someone ask if they found a new name. The answer was no, not really and they thought Marlena might have some ideas.
Well, actually…
Ok. I’ll admit, I didn’t attend this session because I came up with an idea for a re-name a while ago which has stuck in my brain. While I’m not revealing it here, I’ll post something about it soon.
This leads me to my last takeaway from the conf.
I belong here
It took
- Lillie reaching out to me
- doing the work to organize a conference
- having my closest friends and favorite people paying money for a ticket
- seeing those people showing up super-excited at 8:30 in the morning on Saturday!!
- reading my intro speech to a packed house
This day taught me more about myself and who I am than I thought it would.
It turns out, I am a leader here.
XP is my home. It is what I do. It is who I am. It is how I work. It is how I experience the collaborative act of building software. It is my own form of artistic expression and it is important to me that XP be an inclusive place for people of all colors and all genders.
Thanks to all of the wonderful people who took time out of their weekend to come and participate in our discussions. You made it a truly magical day.
