We held our first Agile Methodology Project Group meeting on October 24! Eight of us got together, introduced ourselves to each other, organized ourselves around a common interest of learning more about XP, and picked a project to get first-hand experience with this software development methodology. We also had a chance to try out JUnit, a framework designed to simplify unit testing within Java, and see how it can be used for test-driven development.

We put forth several ideas for a suitable project, and settled on developing an application to play the card game Hearts. As our "customer" hasn't defined exactly what this is yet, we'll have to explore the requirements in the Planning Game. Following that we'll do some Iteration Planning. Coding will begin in earnest at our third meeting.

The second meeting for the Agile Methodology Project Group is scheduled for Wednesday, November 6 at 6:30-8:30 pm. We will be meeting at Simacor [directions].

Our guidebooks to learning more about XP will be the two books Extreme Programming Explained - Embrace Change by Kent Beck and Extreme Programming Installed by Ron Jeffries, Ann Anderson, and Chet Hendrickson.

If you need to reach me for any reason, e-mail me at xyz@att.net where xyz is replaced with ThomasBecker.