I am your host, Régis Medina - a French software development consultant based in Paris. My job is to help teams build great software with the less effort, dealing as effectively as possible with the perpetual pitfalls of changing requirements, overly optimistic expectations and promises, creeping software decay, etc.

I am one of the early adopters of Extreme Programming here in France. I discovered XP back in 1998, when it was still in the early stages of its inception in the patterns community. In 2000 I published Design-up, a website dedicated to introduce XP to French developers. In 2001, I co-authored the first French book on XP, Gestion de Projet Extreme Programming, and during the past few years I have had the opportunity to give a number of talks about XP at conferences and seminars, and for various kinds of audiences in the companies I worked with. Since 2001 I have had some great successes with XP, making it very difficult for me to work in a non-XP project again.

That being said, XP is not an end in itself, and I am still integrating influences from many other areas. Today, I organize my growth around three major centers of interest:

Hyperproductive
Teamwork

  • Creating a shared vision of the project and the product
  • Understanding the dynamics of conflict resolution
  • Creating a culture of relentless improvement
  • Defining lightweight and efficient processes

Software
Design

  • Creating software structures that grow over time and yet remain easy to change
  • Applying usability principles to write code that is easier to work with
  • Building frameworks and modular structures

User
Experience

  • Applying usability principles to create simple interfaces for complex products
  • Designing experiences based on ideas drawn from software usability, industrial and graphics design, and even marketing

If you are interested in the same topics, or if you think I can be of any help, please get in touch with me - I'll be glad to meet you.