Interactive training
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Hi folks! My boss asked me to give an interactive training to our developers Requierement / ideas: Total time about 1 hrs / 1h30 The team is about 12 developers (all level) The goal is to help improve something and make the team better The topic is not clearly fixed but my Idea might be something about "clean code" as we have lots of maintenance code that most of the time didn't tell the intent so just helping that might give a huge gain. I could imagine: - Asking to write a small program (or faster to complete missing part of a project) with cases that often lead to bad code. (like unreadable bool expression, use/reuse of temp variable ...) This might be in team of 2 person if they wish The goal of this exercises might not be disclosed so they will more focus on the result than the maintenance side - Then in the meeting room we could review the samples and discuss about it - I would have a sample ready (if stress goes to high) but i might try doing some refactoring live just to make things better. Questions Have you ever experimented this kind of exercise? Any better Idea or some resource to get more idea? Have you an idea of a sample to ask? I feel that something like FizzBuzz will be to much complicated for most of the audience (they aren't algorithm kind but mostly client/server and data entry form. I prefer not going to deep in OO either) Thanks a lot. Vincent
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Hi folks! My boss asked me to give an interactive training to our developers Requierement / ideas: Total time about 1 hrs / 1h30 The team is about 12 developers (all level) The goal is to help improve something and make the team better The topic is not clearly fixed but my Idea might be something about "clean code" as we have lots of maintenance code that most of the time didn't tell the intent so just helping that might give a huge gain. I could imagine: - Asking to write a small program (or faster to complete missing part of a project) with cases that often lead to bad code. (like unreadable bool expression, use/reuse of temp variable ...) This might be in team of 2 person if they wish The goal of this exercises might not be disclosed so they will more focus on the result than the maintenance side - Then in the meeting room we could review the samples and discuss about it - I would have a sample ready (if stress goes to high) but i might try doing some refactoring live just to make things better. Questions Have you ever experimented this kind of exercise? Any better Idea or some resource to get more idea? Have you an idea of a sample to ask? I feel that something like FizzBuzz will be to much complicated for most of the audience (they aren't algorithm kind but mostly client/server and data entry form. I prefer not going to deep in OO either) Thanks a lot. Vincent
Hi Vincent, Nice post. I have some ideas: 1) If you feel, you can tell them before the training to think of an idea. - Realize that idea into an algorithm. In the training you can discuss the algorithm. In fact you can hold one more session to discuss the coding part of it(Filter out the people whose idea is innovative). - This way, may be some of them can even come up with a patent of their own. - Development includes innovation as well. 2) Or, an interactive session could be some thing like giving them a complex piece of code in the training and telling them to give their thoughts on it. - Thoughts could be code optimization - Impending/Current bugs in the code 3) A reverse of the point 2 could be fruitful as well, i.e. telling them to find out a code full of bugs. - You can have a "lessons learned" session to not write such a code (Which we very frequently have :) ). I would also suggest to not give this task in pairs in the beginning, this would help every one to speed up as soon as possible. It could also happen that the first session might not fruitful, but consecutive sessions will work fine. Once you gain the momentum, you can keep this session once a week. Thanks, Rahul