Tag: code camp

Code Camp Experiences II

A review of our first company code camp using Code Retreats like Corey Haines would do. Short summary: It was a lot of fun and we learned a lot. Go try it out yourself!

Last friday, we held a Code Camp instead of an Open Source Love Day (OSLD). We reserved a whole day for the company to pratice together and share our abilities on the coding level. While this usually already happens every now and then with pair programming sessions, this time we all worked on the same assignment and could compare our experiences. And this comparability worked great for us. This article tries to summarize our setup and the outcome of the Code Camp

Setup of the Code Camp

We tried to imitate a typical Code Retreat day in the manner of Corey Haines. If you haven’t heard about Code Retreats, Corey or the software craftsmanship idea, you could read about it in the links. The presentation of Corey at the QCon conference about software craftsmanship is also a valuable watch.

There are some resources on the internet about how to run a Code Retreat event from the organizational and facilitator’s point of view. This material gave us a good understanding of the whole event, even though our setup was different, as we had no explicit facilitator and fixed workplaces, already prepared for pair programming usage. We didn’t invite external programmers to the event, so every participant was part of our development team. We had to end the event by 16 o’clock due to schedule conflicts and started at 9 o’clock, so our retreat count would be lower than 6 or even 7.

Basically, we tried to program Conway’s Game of Life within 45 minutes in pairs of two developers repeatedly. After the 45 minutes have passed (supervised by an alarm clock), we deleted the code and gathered for an iteration review of 15 minutes. Then, we started over again. This agenda should repeat throughout the day. No other activity or goal was planned, but we anticipated a longer retrospective meeting at the end of the day.

Execution of the Code Camp

The team gathered at 9 o’clock and performed setup tasks on the computers (like preparing a clean workspace). At 09:15, we held an introduction meeting for the Code Camp. I explained the basics and motives of Code Retreats and presented the rules for Conway’s Game of Life. The team heard most of the information for the first time, so nobody was particularly more experienced with the task or the conduct.

The first iteration started at 10 o’clock and had everybody baffled by the end of the iteration. The first retrospective meeting was interesting, as fundamental approaches to the problem were discussed with very little words needed for effective communication. Everybody wanted to move into the second iteration, which started at 11 o’clock.

At the end of the second iteration, two of the four teams nearly reached their anticipated goals. In the retrospective, the results were incredibly more advanced compared to the first iteration. This effect was similar to my first code camp: The second iteration is the breakthrough in the problem domain. Afterwards, the solutions are refined, but without the massive boost in efficiency compared to the other iterations except the first one.

We went to lunch early this day and returned with great ideas for the next round. After a short coffee break with video games, we started at around 13:45 for the third iteration.

The third iteration resulted in the first playable versions of the game. The solutions grew more beautiful and the teams began to experiment with their approaches, as the content-related task was mentally covered. This was the most productive iteration in terms of resulting software. But as usual, the code was deleted without a trace directly after the iteration. The iteration review meeting brought up a radically different approach on the problem as previously anticipated. This inspired every team for the fourth iteration.

In the fourth iteration, every team tried to implement the new approach. And every team failed to gain substantial ground, just like in the first iteration. The iteration review meeting was interesting, but we skipped another iteration in favor of the full retrospective of the Code Retreat.

Effects of the Code Camp

The Code Retreat iterations had great impact on our team. We discussed our impressions informally and then turned back to the formal retrospective questions as suggested by Alex Bolboaca:

  • How did you feel?
  • What have you learned?
  • What will you apply starting Monday?

The first question got answered by a “mood graph”, rising steadily from iteration one to three, with a yawning abyss at iteration four. This was another strong indicator that the iterations sort of restarted with iteration four.

The second question (“What have you learned?”) was answered more variably, but it stuck out that many keyboard shortcuts and little helpful IDE tricks were learnt throughout the day. We tracked the origin and propagation of two shortcuts and came to the result that one developer knew them beforehands, transferred the knowledge to the partner in the first iteration and both spread it further in the second iteration. By the end of the third iteration, everybody had learned the new shortcut. It was impressive to see this kind of knowledge transfer in such a clear manner.

The third question revolved around the coolest new shortcuts and tricks.

But we learned a lot more than just a few shortcuts. Most of all, we had a comparable coding experience with every other developer on our team. This isn’t about competition, it’s about personality. And we’ve found that the team works great in every combination. Some subtle fears of “being behind with knowledge” got diminished, too.

Future of the Code Camp

Everybody wants to do it again. So we’ll do it again. We decided to perform one Code Camp every three months. This isn’t too often to wear off, but hopefully often enough to keep our practice level high. We also decided to run dedicated Code Camps with external developers soon. The first event will happen in December 2010.

Follow-up to our Dev Brunch October 2010

A follow-up to our October 2010 Dev Brunch, summarizing the talks and providing bonus material.

Last Sunday , we held our Dev Brunch for October 2010. We gathered inside (no more roof garden sessions for this year) and had a good time with lots of chatter besides the topics listed below.

The Dev Brunch

If you want to know more about the meaning of the term “Dev Brunch” or how we implement it, have a look at the follow-up posting of the brunch in October 2009. We continue to allow presence over topics. Our topics for the brunch were:

  • Beyond Scrum – The first-hand tale of a local team that transformed their process to do Scrum and failed for several reasons. They finally admitted failure and search for alternatives since. Great stories of mistakes you don’t have to make yourself to learn the lessons now. We decided to transform at least some aspects of the whole story in an essay, as it’s too valuable to not be published.
  • Code Camp experiences – We already blogged about it, but this talk gave away more details and more insight from the trainer’s perspective. The speaker guided a two-day developer code camp in the spirit of code retreats with an experienced team and draw several conclusions from the event. In short: It’s well worth the time and you will see your team differently afterwards. Other attendees added their experiences with team games that reveal social structures and behaviour even quicker.
  • Local dev gossip – Yes, this is a rather unusual topic for the offical topic list, but we exchanged so much gossip talk this time that it qualifies as a topic on its own behalf. The best summarization of this topic is that there’s a lot of moving around in the local developer community, at least from our point of view. We look forward to a very exciting next year.

As there was no dev brunch in September (due to several reasons), we needed to talk about the news and rumours of two months at once. And there are a lot of things going on around here in the moment. A great brunch with lots of useful information.

Code Camp Experiences

Experiences gained when performing a two day code camp with a team.

Some weeks ago, I conducted a code camp with a team of twelve developers that build a software product together for years now. The team had already introduced sporadic code reviews (in the team vs. author review style), so the main emphasize of the meeting was to improve team coherence by writing code together while generally having some time off project. In this article, I describe what I had planned, what happened and what the effects are so far.

A plan for the code camp

The code camp was scheduled for two consecutive days when the whole team gathers in one room with one computer for each pair. We would switch pairs (and seats) after each iteration, with one iteration being 45 minutes coding time followed by 2-3 minutes presentation of the achievement to the team. With a recreation break of 20-30 minutes, this means one iteration every two hours.

Every iteration starts from scratch, without access to previous code fragments (see also the code retreat concept). This had several reasons: I wanted the iterations to be comparable. Some of the insights I wanted to share are dependent on directly assimilable experiences. The iterations should also be independent, without ballast from previous sessions.

On the first day, we started with a given code resembling a little puzzle game in Java Swing. The code worked, but had some bugs and was written in an awful manner. It was unknown code for the team with no emotional attachments. The assignment for each iteration was to refactor the code to something equivalently working, but much “better”. How this “better” is defined was up to the teams.

On the second day, we started with a blank editor and had the task to code the same little puzzle game (in Java Swing) we refactored the day before. Even with some practice, it was nearly impossible to finish within time, so concentration on the most important key aspects of the code was crucial. The main lesson here was to “create from scratch” rather than “fix the existing”.

What really happened

Day one

The camp started with the usual delay for setting up all the computers in a uniform manner. This couldn’t be prepared beforehands, as the computers were in use by another group. When we installed our software, we found the hotkey configuration of the whole system severely flawed (for example, Ctrl+1 was defined as “set keyboard layout to traditional chinese”).

To warm up for the first iteration, I presented the existing code and explained its structure in detail. The code was slightly too much to remember it all in one pass, so only a rough understanding remained. Every team had to examine the code again during their work.

After the warm up, the first iteration started, with everybody buzzing over the code. The 45 minutes went by really fast and the first presentations focussed on local improvements. No team had restructured the code in any meaningful way, but every solution was perceived as “better” than the original. One team failed to get their refactored code to work again.

The second iteration held the biggest surprise of the whole camp. The 45 minutes flew by and the presentations showed the difference. One team failed to work on the assignment, but every other team presented a solution that was far superior of the original code. Some teams restructured the code to an extend where the original structure wasn’t recognizable anymore. The distinction between the first and the second iteration was so great that everybody was baffled by what could be achieved in 45 minutes when you do it for the second time.

The third iteration added some interesting twists on the best solutions of the second iteration, but didn’t produce the massive boost in productivity and code quality. Everybody felt worn out afterwards, so we decided to close the coding part of this day.

While working with the Java Swing code, nobody on the team noticed the threading flaws in the code. When I pointed this out, I was asked to explain the mechanics of the Swing threading model. The team develops a web application and hasn’t much exposure to desktop application development, let alone with Java Swing. So we ended the day with a lecture about the EDT, the EventQueue and the SwingWorker.

The whole team strolled to a bar to share some beers afterwards.

Day two

After a short night, we gathered early in the morning to continue the coding part of the camp. I explained the task (develop the game from scratch) and off we went.

The first iteration yielded only very rudimentary results. One team started with an UML diagram of the application structure and had to stop after setting up the outline of every method in code. Most other teams started with the domain model and failed to attach the GUI part of the application. All solutions had similar concepts in mind, no team used test driven development or other “advanced” techniques.

As a result of the poor performance, we decided to change the rules. Instead of scrapping the whole code, every new team could take over the code base of any other team, as long as it wasn’t the own. In the second iteration, we completed the drafted solutions of the previous team. This didn’t work out, too. The teams were frustrated by their lack of results.

We changed the plan again and held a prolonged review discussion of the code camp instead of a third iteration. This was by far the better choice with hindsight.

The effects

The code camp was perceived very positively by the attendees. The main goal of the camp was not about coding, but about team coherence and team focus. We learnt a lot about the personal style and abilities of each team member because the code samples shown in the code review were directly comparable. And we revealed team problems we weren’t aware of yet, but some problems we thought would arise did not. This was a very healthy process, because some of these issues can be addressed directly now.

The side benefit of the camp, as stated by one programmer was the increased awareness that “throwing away your code and starting over isn’t as hurtful as I thought”.

Every attendee stated that they want another code camp soon.

Personal summary

The code camp greatly improved my sense for the team and for the individual team members. By sharing a common code base and performing the same tasks, I could directly see (and feel) their thoughts and abilities. The camp is a powerful way to get to really know a team. If you have to mentor a whole new team, consider performing a code camp to get in touch with them.