Garrick West on ’Building’ Great Developers with XP & Agile plus the Best Debugging

2025-03-24

🔥 How do you actually build great software developers? How do you debug like a pro? And what happens when XP (Extreme Programming) makes a comeback after the Scrum backlash? Join us as Garrick West—a seasoned XP practitioner, Agile coach, and software craftsmanship advocate—dives into:✅ Building Agile Software Developers: From XP mentorship to industry-academia collaboration✅ The Best Debugging Strategies: Unpacking The Debugging Book and applying its rules in a mob✅ Reviving XP & Software Crafting: Why XP is more crucial than ever in Agile teams

🔥 How do you actually build great software developers? How do you debug like a pro? And what happens when XP (Extreme Programming) makes a comeback after the Scrum backlash?

Join us as Garrick West—a seasoned XP practitioner, Agile coach, and software craftsmanship advocate—dives into:
✅ Building Agile Software Developers: From XP mentorship to industry-academia collaboration
✅ The Best Debugging Strategies: Unpacking The Debugging Book and applying its rules in a mob
✅ Reviving XP & Software Crafting: Why XP is more crucial than ever in Agile teams

🚀 Garrick's Story: From Early Coding to XP Champion
Garrick started coding at 10 years old (at day camps in the 80s! 😅), earned a Computer Science degree, and had his development worldview shaped by reading the first edition of Extreme Programming Explained. He has worked at XP-centric organizations, trained teams in TDD (Test-Driven Development), Ensemble Programming, and CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment), and even revamped a college curriculum from Waterfall to XP/Scrum.

🎯 "Building" Agile Software Developers

The power of an XP coach early in a developer’s journey
Public speaking as a dev skill? (Toastmasters, teaching at community college)
What happened when Garrick helped convert a college curriculum from Waterfall to XP/Scrum?
Industry experts + academia: How can professional devs and educators collaborate better?
The apprentice model: What it means and why learning stages (like the Dreyfus Model) matter
AI & developer education: Does AI replace early learning stages, or is it just a slick salesman?
Scaling Gilded Rose Kata to different skill levels
Test Coverage as a red herring—what should we focus on instead?

🐞 Debugging: The Missing Developer Superpower
Ever heard of The Debugging Book? Most developers haven’t—but it’s a game-changer. We explore:

Debugging as problem-solving, not just "stepping through" in an IDE
The 9 Debugging Rules: From reading the manual to never throwing away a good test tool
How to gamify debugging in a mob & introduce a "debugging auditor" role
The anti-pattern of multiple experiments at once—and how to avoid it
Why debugging is like navigating a labyrinth with a million wrong paths

🔄 Reviving XP & Software Crafting After the Scrum Backlash

XP fills Scrum’s missing middle: Building the right thing (Scrum) AND building it right (XP)
How Scrum without XP leads to a “Ball of Mud” in just 18 months
Why XP + Lean is the ultimate combination
Breaking free from sprints & pressure cookers—just focus on continuous iterations
Can XP stand without Scrum? Or does Scrum need XP?