This year's agile lab (starting at August, 27th) will be about the development of a web-based gaming platform for mobile devices. This time we'll develop with the popular Ruby on Rails web application framework and therefore program in Ruby.

Ruby is a fully object-oriented (“everything is object”), flexible, concise, and elegant programming language released in 1995. It has always been one of the leading languages in Asia and is nowadays also very popular in Europe and USA since Rails had its arrival.

In the agile lab about 10 students (sometimes more) will work together as a team on our software project for 4,5 weeks, eight hours a day. We will altogether start each morning with a collective breakfast before we meet in the working room. Then we'll work till the evening, interrupted by lunch. We'll nearly have the complete first floor in the b-it with three working rooms and a kitchen.

The lab is brought forward and officially takes place in the winter term (Wintersemester). Therefore you have the chance to get your certificates in the free period, roughly half a year in advance. And by the way, for computer science students it's of course a common lab of the main study period (Hauptstudiumspraktikum).

Some details about the project we will develop:

• Developing a Rails web application
• Map-based gaming platform
• Context/Event driven (I come along $bucks and get the offer to drink a coffee which will increase my bonus/life points)
• GPS-based
• Google Maps / OpenStreetMap (www.openstreetmap.org)

Some key facts about agile software development:

• We are a team, no one is left behind
• We start and end the working day together, and we work no more than 8 hours a day (so that we are fit the next morning)
• We work in pairs and swap for different tasks
• Communication is seen as the main reason for successful projects
• Everyone gets intensive support all day, all the time
• really fun
• convey technical as well as social skills in a comparatively short time

The lab has always profited by a good mixture of novices and more skilled students resulting in a very heterogenous team. This enables and boosts different points of view which has always been very beneficial for the overall outcome. I'm proud to mention that in the past we had very successful labs and worked together with bigger companies like Deutsche Telekom or Ravensburger (the lab a year ago and it's results even made it to a press report and several external presentations).

The Agile Software Development Lab (formerly known as XP Lab) is organized and carried out in the context of the

Software Engineering (Softwaretechnologie) and Object-Oriented Software Engineering (OOSE) lectures of the

Institute of Computer Science III
University of Bonn
Prof. A. B. Cremers and Dr. G. Kniesel

and the

Bonn-Aachen International Center for Information Technology (b-it)
International Program of Excellence (IPEC)

Responsible for the lab are: Pascal Bihler, Mark Schmatz, Daniel Speicher, Holger Mügge