At OOPSLA 2004 you have an opportunity to experience Extreme Programming in a day without programming. Instead, we will construct an artifact in an extreme way, using most of the practices of Extreme Programming.
This exercise is open and would be beneficial to many different sorts of people: XP wannabees, potential customers, educators, in fact, anyone interested in how the practices fit together. If you are a manager, for example, who wants to see and experience XP, but are not a programmer this will give you an opportunity to see and evaluate how it might work.
This exercise has also been used successfully to train willing, but inexperienced teams, including customers and managers.
Each participant will take a role in the exercise: Constructor, Customer, or Tracker. All participate in the planning game in which the customers decide what is wanted and express requirements in the form of stories on cards. The Constructors estimate the time required to fulfill the requirement and then an iteration begins in which the constructors build the features for the current set of stories. The trackers try to keep everyone faithful to the practices:
Planning Game
Pair Construction
On-site Customer
Test First Construction
Simple Design
Short Releases
Sustainable Pace
Continuous Refactoring
Continuous Integration
Collective Ownership
Construction Standards
Metaphor
Part of the day will be spent in a retrospective on the process. It is not expected, in fact, that things will go smoothly. This is extremely instuctive, as the exercise will clearly demonstrate the effect of not using the practices together.
Teams that have used an exercise like this find that later, when doing Extreme Programming, they have a way to look back on the training process to guide their use of the practices in their project and to see why things go wrong when they do.
You can learn more about the topic from the original Extreme Construction page.