Sprinting Days

PHOTO: A Sprint Room at D.C. PyCon 2005

Planned Sprint Topics

The planned sprint topics are listed in the Python wiki at:

  http://wiki.python.org/moin/PyCon2006/Sprints

To join a sprint, add your name to the wiki page for the sprint.

To add your own sprint, create a new page for planning your sprint and edit the list of sprints to include your new page.

What is sprinting?

A sprint is a focused development session, in which developers pair in a room and focus on building a particular subsystem. A sprint is organized with a coach leading the session. The coach sets the agenda, tracks activities, and keeps the development moving. The developers will sometimes work in pairs using the Extreme Programming (XP) pair programming approach.

The sprint approach works best when the first few hours are spent getting oriented -- presenting a tutorial for the development material, laying out the stories to tackle for the day, getting everyone a CVS or SVN checkout to work with. Sprint orientation sessions will probably be on either Sunday afternoon or Monday morning.

ZopeMag's miniGuide to Zope Sprinting is a good introductory article; just mentally remove every "Zope" from the article to make it generic.

Why sprint at PyCon?

The sprints are intended to benefit various projects, and to encourage more people to take part in development. They will also be a good place to see Extreme Programming or other Agile Methods in action, and to work closely with experienced Python developers.

PyCon will always have a core Python sprint. Other topics will come and go each year.

When is it taking place?

The sprint rooms are still to be decided, but sprints will run from 8am to 6pm (roughly) each day from Monday, February 27, 2006 through Thursday, March 2, 2006.

Sounds great, how do I get involved?

If you wish to participate in a sprint, please contact the sprint organizers in advance! Sprint topics are listed in the Python wiki. Important! Sprints which don't generate enough interest in advance may be dropped by their organizers.

Sprints are free, and informal. In fact if you want one on a topic you don't see, go ahead and create a wiki page for planning your sprint in detail.

Logistics

During the sprints people often hang out on the #pycon-sprints IRC channel, chatting and coordinating tasks and meals.