Here are some ideas that came up in a discussion with others who shared their experience and ideas about training from a distance.
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I am now a Certified Scrum Trainer®.
Ping me if you would like to schedule a Certified ScrumMaster or Certified Scrum Product Owner class.
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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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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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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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Last week I was doing a training session in Melbourne, Australia. I had an especially energetic and interested group of people to work with. In basic agile training, a 1.5 day workshop, I introduced Test Driven Development very briefly, cutting it short because we were going to spend the whole next day doing a TDD lab. I mainly gave a sales pitch including the statement that, after decades of writing software, learning TDD made me a better programmer by at least a factor of four. That is a pretty fuzzy claim, but I make it for effect.
Popularity: 12% [?]