After taking the Asshole Test, now is time to know about the Asshole Driven Development and other “alternative” methodologies

PS: see all the comments about the Scott Berkun’s post. There’s a lot of new acronyms there too.

Reading about several things they don’t teach you in school, one that sounded me very important is how to deal with failure:

In school, kid’s learn that “failure” is a negative term.
However, it is nothing of the sort. There has never been a
single successful person who hasn’t failed numerous times on
their journey to success.

In fact, the most successful people in life are those who
have failed the most.

Edison ‘failed’ more than ten thousand times before he
succeeded in creating the light bulb. As said by Thomas
Edison: “I have not failed 10,000 times. I have
successfully found 10,000 ways that will not work.”

In software development, failure is mostly seem as a negative term too. Obviously we don’t want to deliver software with bugs to the end users, but I believe that most of the bugs could be avoided if the developers change their view about failure.

When you start doing Test-Driven Development, one of the first lessons you learn is how failures are useful during the development process. Every test that fails is an allied to understand a little more about the problem you’re trying to solve. Why don’t they tell this in Software Engineering class? I really don’t know.

For the last year I’ve been involved with the organization of Coding Dojo meetings in Florianopolis/Brazil. This kind of “coding meetings” started in France and spread to Finland, United States (Pittsburgh and Houston), United Kingdom, Canada, Brazil and Sweden.

The sessions are basically about solving a programming challenges using Pair Programming and Test-Driven Development. Everyone is welcome since there’s no skill prerequisites for attendees. The main goal is simple: improve coding skills through practice.

Apparently today when it comes to Agile, there’s a huge gap between the software Industry and Academia. I thought it was just in Brazil, but it seems that there’s too much students out there finishing their degrees without even heard about it. Well, the Coding Dojo doesn’t fill this gap, but it seems to be right at the middle: it’s a simple way to learn about some agile concepts and it can benefit both Industry and Academia.

Today I’m not living in Florianopolis anymore but I’m helping my friends there to keep the sessions running. New people are asking me about the next meetings and in the last weeks I heard about at least more 2 possible Dojos (one more in France and other in Sweden). I think it’s just the beginning for the Coding Dojo Global.

My result was:

Your programmer personality type is:

DHTC

You’re a Doer.
You are very quick at getting tasks done. You believe the outcome is the most important part of a task and the faster you can reach that outcome the better. After all, time is money.

You like coding at a High level.
The world is made up of objects and components, you should create your programs in the same way.

You work best in a Team.
A good group is better than the sum of it’s parts. The only thing better than a genius programmer is a cohesive group of genius programmers.

You are a Conservative programmer.
The less code you write, the less chance there is of it containing a bug. You write short and to the point code that gets the job done efficiently.

Now you can take the test too or simply check the other possible results.