Wolf Pack Programming?

Smalltalk – and in particular, Cincom VisualWorks – was the birthplace of agile software development.  The practices that later became known as agile development – test first, customer driven, pair programming, and so on?  They were all spawned from the C3 Project.  Since that time agile development has become many things to many people.  We believe that it’s fitting to bring the next step in agile forward from the same place it was born: Smalltalk.

If programming in pairs and continuously integrating your code are good things, what if we took that to the next level?  What if a team of developers, working singly and in pairs, could work against the same continuously updated, live codebase at the same time?  Now they can, using Cincom WebVelocity and what we call “Wolf Pack Programming™”.

Developers connect to the same Smalltalk system via a standard web browser, and work together towards a working application.  Updates made by each developer are immediately seen by all other developers—they are all connected to the same system, and that system notifies them of updates to that system immediately. 

We’ve run a few experiments with this at conferences, with all the members of the “pack” in the same room.  However, that’s not a limitation.  We have the evaluation version of WebVelocity available as an Amazon EC2 instance, so you can set up a cloud-based Smalltalk system and do this yourself, with people who are all in one place, or geographically distant from each other.

We are bringing this development practice out to the developer community this fall and winter at a number of events across Europe – check out our events page for the full list of events.  You can come to participate as a member of the pack, or just watch it all unfold.

• Click here for more information on Wolf Pack Programming.