Fearless Change

I have in my OOPSLA conference bag a copy of a long anticipated book "Fearless Change" by Linda Rising and Mary Lynn Manns ISBN: 0201741571 I first met Linda and Mary Lynn at OT2001 in their workshop "Introducing patterns (or any new idea) into an organization". I was a little in awe, as this was was my first time I attended a prestigious conference, but if you attend a workshop you have to contribute. I racked my brains furiously trying to think of a pattern. At that time, there were many developers in the software community who wanted to try out XP but they were having a hard time persuading their peers and bosses. I felt so lucky to have fallen on my feet and found a job at Connextra - a company setup on XP principles in 1999. Connextra took XP so seriously that we had custom-made convex desks for pair-programming and sliding pinboard and whiteboard walls in easy reach of our workstations. When we told developers at eXtreme Tuesday Club all about our XP implementation, they were sometimes a little cynical about this XP nirvana but our stories gave some developers who wanted to try XP a little reassurance that XP could really work and some ideas of techniques they could try. In some senses, they were looking for a "shoulder to cry on" and so this was the pattern I wrote on my index card at that workshop. Amazingly, the pattern made it into the book "Fearless Change". The essence of the Shoulder to Cry on pattern is that if you are having a hard time then seek out others in the same situation - sharing stories and pooling ideas can help you pull through tough times when you feel like giving in. We get fewer developers coming to Extreme Tuesday Club with sob stories nowadays, more people are doing XP or at least TDD, but nevertheless XTC remains a great support network that has helped so many of us and who knows, maybe it has played a significant part in the uptake of XP in UK.