November 17th, 2008
Roger
My favorite class to teach is TDD. I like to challenge developers to stretch their brains into new territory. They do it every day in other ways. Learning TDD is a level higher than solving algorithm and design challenges. It is about changing the way you approach programming altogether. And my favorite situation is to see the light go on in the mind of someone who starts out as a skeptic. “I’m here because my boss said I had to go” kind of people. Great fun.
Sometime I get challenges back. By now, after doing this for a few years, I can answer many of the predicatable questions pretty easily. Every once in a while I get some harder questions. I thought I would share some of these and the answers I came up with.
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This is my own follow up to Is Twitter an Approximation of Team Room Osmotic Chatter?
After some months of using Twitter, my conclusion is inconclusive. My usage patterns are fairly clear. I scan it many times a day if I am connected to the interweb. I tweet when I am not busy working, when I want to ask a question to the ether (answers often come from outside of my network of twittermates) or when I am not working because my brain is fried or I am stuck in an airport. Often times a tweet exchange switches to an IM conversation or email thread.
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September 12th, 2008
Roger
I detect a pattern of group behavior. No doubt it is already described elsewhere and has a fancy name. Self-organization, perhaps. The pattern first revealed itself to me at Agile2008 in a workshop on release planning. It came at that closing moment when everyone is invited to offer a lesson learned. Somehow I felt a need to state something aloud as if that was a necessary element of getting my money’s worth. So I thought about it, trying to find something that no one else had already said. The pattern emerged.
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Collaboration is fundamental to successful agile projects. A team of people working together toward a shared goal will create a different product than a group of individuals working alone on parallel assignments to be integrated later. Collaboration supplies automatic load balancing, constant discussion and generation of new ideas and communication on the status of the work. A goal for successful agile practice is to foster collaboration in the team. There is much in the literature about how to do this, nicely summed up in Jean Tabaka’s great book,Collaboration Explained.
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Once upon a time I worked in a place that required design documents before any code was written. I won’t go into all of the pros and cons of that particular practice here. You have probably heard them all by now. What I want to do is describe an agile alternative that I offer to teams, based on personal experience as a team member.
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While reading Scott Bain’s great book Emergent Design, I was reminded of a story. It took place a couple of years ago inside a very tall building in a very large city. I was giving an early version of my Test Driven Development workshop. There were about 25 developers to entertain. I asked the standard calibration questions:
- How many of you are doing TDD now? Answer: none
- How many of you do unit testing? Answer: none
- How many of you know what unit testing is? Answer: some
- Of those of you who know what it is, do you think it is a good idea? Answer: yes
- Why, then, do you not do it? Answer: we don’t have time
It was not an unusual set of answers, of course. I have had that same dialog with more than one group.
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