I haven’t mentioned the Cincinnati XP Users Group, and need to correct that oversight now. XP-Cinci has been meeting every month for a year! We learn XP by practicing it on a real project at the meeting. Our project is a web-based event scheduling system for Cincinnati’s Children's Hospital (we hold our meetings at the hospital). One of the hospital IT staff members acts as our customer and we usually have enough folks there to have 5 to 6 pairs of Java programmers and a pair using Ruby (guess where I am).

The project is moving slowly. It is very difficult to come in once a month and work a few hours on a project, and then leave it for another month. We spend a good portion of the meeting remembering what we did last month, and just as we get up to speed, the meeting is almost over. It’s a good thing that the goal of the group is more to learn XP practices than to actually finish this project.

Tonight we concentrated on continuous integration. As soon as we had a new JUnit test working, we were to get the integration token and commit to our CVS repository.

If you are in the Cincinnati area and want to join us, feel free. We meet on the first Tuesday of the month. You can find more information here.