Next Thursday I’ll be running a coding dojo at the Software Craftsmanship 2009. My goal is to discuss why people should organise dojos at their companies and learn more about alternative approaches people are using to improve programming skills.
It seems like it’ll be an interesting event:
This conference is all about the principles and practices, and the disciplines and habits, that distinguish the best 10% of software professionals from the 90% who are failing their customers and failing their profession by taking no care or pride in their work and delivering buggy, unreliable and unmaintainable code.
If you managed to save your spot (registration are now closed), see you there!
For the people wanting to practice their programming skills, the next open coding dojo will be this Thursday (12th) at the Skillsmatter office. After presenting a very interesting kata on the last session, Danilo Sato will be conducing this dojo.
Don’t forget to register on their website and join our mailing list if you want to know more about the challenge and the session format for this session.
Having cards on the wall is one of the most basic agile practices. Writing index cards or post-its and sticking them on the wall is fun and makes the work place look cool and organized at the same time. What we can’t forget, though, is that just having them there doesn’t make any team agile. And we can tell something is going wrong…
- When people work on features that are not on the wall
- When there are no priorities for the cards
- When people don’t work on the highest priorities first
- When people work on more than one card at the same time
- When just one person can tell the current state of a card
- When people don’t have a clear definition of Done
- When people have to be told what’s the next card they should be working on
- When the wall is not constantly updated
- When just one person updates the wall
- When people can’t tell how they are doing by simply looking at the wall
These are clear signs that the wall is not being as helpful as it could. And if these issues are not being worked on along the way it may not take long before people start questioning the use of the wall in the first place.