CodeCopTour Week 11

In the eleventh week of my Software Craftsmanship tour I visited the Austrian Lotteries gaming enterprise. I paired with Felix Kammerer and Stanka Gasic from the development team only one day each. In these days I learned that I am a keyboard hugger ;-) Usually I am dominating my pair. The situation is better if there is no second keyboard because it takes more energy to take it away actively from my pair than to just start typing on my own one. Maybe I will continue my tour without an extra keyboard from now on...

Devoxx 2013
The manager of the Lotteries' development department had invited me for a longer visit, and I had planned my tour accordingly, but I had to change my plans on short notice. In a last-minute lottery the Vienna Scala User Group gave away a ticket for this year's Devoxx conference in Antwerp, Belgium. I have been to Devoxx before and it really is a great conference. I had not planned for it because I knew that I would be busy with my tour, but obviously I was supposed to go there after all. Luckily my JUG voucher was still valid after the conference had been sold out, which usually happens quite early. On my return I gave a short presentation at the Scala Vienna meetup about my impressions of Devoxx 2013. The short summary is that Devoxx is a great conference and you need to go there, at least once. I probably should write a long summary as well, as I did three years ago, but I rather continue with the findings from my current CodeCopTour. So if you want to know more about Devoxx 2013, please refer to posts other attendees have written, e.g. Bartosz Majsak, Peter Pilgrim or Steve Schols.

Conferences as part of a Journeyman Tour
This brings me to the topic of conferences. Conferences and other community related activities like Coding Dojos or Code Retreats are the perfect addition to a teaching and learning tour. For example Daniel Temme, who did a similar tour earlier this year, actually started his tour during the German SoCraTes conference and visited ALE conference in the middle of his tour. When you plan for a Journeyman tour, adding space for conferences and other technology related meet-ups is easy. Additional to learning something new, conferences provide you with opportunities to discuss your findings with other craftsmen and maybe even find new hosts for your continued tour. As you have no income commercial conferences are out of the question, unless you present something, like I did during Agile Testing Days.

CodeCopTour Week 10

For the tenth week of my Software Craftsmanship tour RISE, the Research Industrial Systems Engineering, invited me to stay for three days and I pair-programmed with Kilian Matt. Kilian had prepared some special work items for my visit and we started refactoring some old piece of legacy code. Kilian was happy because nobody would touch that code and usually he would not have time to work on it himself, but for my visit he had "made some time". We worked together well and I was productive as soon as we sat down to code. Together we made smaller steps in the refactoring than both of us would have taken on their own and we moved forward steadily. Kilian focused on using keyboard short-cuts and I learned some of IDEA's key bindings. In the end of the day we had typed 15.000 keys and clicked 1800 times, a good ratio according to Kilian. (The recording was done with Workrave, a little tool for monitoring your work to avoid Repetitive Strain Injury.) Kilian is a true Software Craftsman and I enjoyed working with him a lot. Thank you very much and special thanks for the cheese ;-)

The third day of my visit I worked with Zeljko Brdaric, who specialized in test automation and BDD. We added a small feature to his code base, and adding the test first I worked for the first time with TestNG. It did not make any difference as the annotations and assertions looked the same as in plain old JUnit. We had an interesting discussion about using present or past tense in commit messages. I liked this attention to detail.

Then I moved on to Dimoco, a company offering mobile payments worldwide. There I pair-programmed with Helmut Jelinek for two days. Helmut had arranged a meeting room for us so we would not disturb other colleagues in the open plan office. It was a very small meeting room, more like an aquarium ;-) I called it the "pair-programming cell", see its picture on the right. Helmut was responsible for Dimoco's reporting backend which collected events throughout the application and aggregated them for monitoring purposes and we added a small feature to its reporting backend. Helmut had a strict attitude about introducing zero defects and was very serious about checking, reviewing and retesting our changes. I have never met a person checking his or her code so closely. Obviously I liked that and will incorporate some elements of his work flow.

Remote Book Club
Besides pair-programming I finished reading Domain-Driven Design by Eric Evans in that week. I participated in a remote reading group, started by a former colleague Jonny Andersson, back in the days when I worked for IBM. Since January we have been meeting online each week and worked through 15 pages of the book each time. It took us 33 meetings in total to go through the 500 pages of the book and a few meetings were delayed due to public holidays or holiday time in general. We had many interesting discussions during the year which made reading the book more fun and the learning experience much richer. Jonny is preparing for the next reading group right now. It will start January 2014 and we are currently discussing which book to read. If you want to join us, stay in touch.

CodeCopTour Weeks 8 and 9

Today ends the tenth week of my Software Craftsmanship tour. I visited several companies, paired with many developers and discussed with even more people about our craft. My memories are blurry, there is just too much to keep track of. Fortunately I use a large notebook to collect thoughts and findings during my tour and it helps me to continue my diary about the recent weeks of my tour. As I need to catch up with three weeks by now, this one is going to be brief.

Week 8
I started the eighth week of my tour visiting Codeship, a Vienna based startup offering hosted Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment solutions for many technologies and hosting platforms. Together with Codeship's development lead Clemens Helm I worked on a feature deep inside the Codeship's Ruby on Rails core. Clemens, of "Testing Tuesday" fame, created a guiding test with Cucumber and then switched to RSpec unit tests for the details. It was a great pairing experience despite that my Ruby skills have degraded considerably causing me to slow down Clemens a bit. Between pairing I joined the Codeship team playing some rounds of tabletop football and improved my skills there as well ;-)

Then I spent three days at Irian, a Java Enterprise consultancy famous for co-founding the Apache MyFaces project. I worked with Jan Zarnikov on a new application in TypeScript. TypeScript, the new open source language from Microsoft, was designed for application-scale JavaScript development and compiles to plain JavaScript. I had never heard of it (it was just created last year) and Jan was concerned if I would be able to work with it. But I had no problems and we made good progress. Jan had prepared all the details in advance and we were just banging out the first version of a touch enabled learning game, driving the whole development by tests. It was awesome! Typescript looked cool and was easy to work with, just the development environment and infrastructure (outside of Visual Studio) needs to catch up.

Dojo Week 9
The following Monday I facilitated an in-house Code Retreat for two development teams. Although there were only ten participants, the final retrospective showed many learnings, which was proof for me that the Code Retreat was useful for them. I want to point out how great this Vienna based company is. Running Code Retreats as part of developer education is awesome and I only know a few companies that do things like that.

The rest of the week I attended the Agile Testing Days 2013, an annual European conference. I had been invited by the organizers to run the Coding Dojos each afternoon of the conference. I chose three different katas for the Dojos to keep things interesting. I started with Refactoring the Tennis Kata, a kata designed by Emily Bache. The provided source code of scoring a Tennis game was awful but had a comprehensive suite of automated tests which allowed the participants to focus entirely on refactoring. All seats were taken and we had a great Dojo with good discussions in the end. The following day I helped the participants to Design Test Cases for the Gilded Rose Kata, originally made up by Terry Hughes and modified by Emily Bache. The prepared code base contained some (spaghetti-) business logic but no tests. The participants were asked to add test cases. Again we had a great Dojo with good discussions in the end. For the third Dojo I had prepared the exercise of TDD as if you meant it, as proposed by Keith Braithwaite. I considered it a difficult exercise and the participants were struggling with the concept in the beginning. After some time they made progress and even skipped the break to enjoy pair programming for additional 25 minutes. Obviously they meant it ;-)

I did not pair program with anybody during this week, but learned many new things in the conference sessions and taught a few things to the participants of the Coding Dojos. I had great discussions in the evenings with like minded people and made some new friends as well. Food was provided at the conference venue and travel cost was refunded by the conference organizers. All these facts come pretty close to the requirements for my Journeyman Tour ;-)

How to sell a Journeyman Tour to Management

I have been asked by several fellow craftsmen how to sell my Journeyman Tour to management. When preparing my tour I had to help people willing to host me to convince their bosses that my visit would be a good idea. Here are some points you might use to justify a Journeyman visit.

Corey Haines did not write anything about convincing management in his Journeyman blog back in 2008. Earlier this year I sent him an email asking for an advice. Although I believe Corey is a busy man, he answered my question. Here is what he wrote:

I'm afraid that I don't have a lot of advice on pre-selling the idea to management. I stayed away from companies that had trouble figuring out the value of having me there. Especially at the beginning, a lot of companies were a bit worried about the idea of having someone in. I just started without them. One major advice I have that is based on my experience is to just start. I didn't really plan things out too far in advance, especially at the beginning. If you just start going to some of the places that you do know, then others might start to turn their attitudes around. Make sure that you blog, do videos, etc, to get the word out of what you are doing. That way, companies will have something to focus on when they are making the decision. (Corey Haines, private mail, 29th of July 2013)

Start with companies who understand the idea.
So the first plan is not to convince management but just start with companies who understand the idea. This surely works if you travel a large enough area, as Daniel Temme's tour around Germany shows. So try to travel an area as large as possible.

Ask startups and small companies to host you.
As far as I noticed, small companies are more likely to host you. I started my tour with two startups, Blossom and letsplay.io because their founders just agreed to my visit without any questions. Especially the lean startup movement is open to the ideas of learning and continuous improvement. People running one-man businesses who are not permanently working at the customer's site seem to be more open to visits as well, e.g. Lunifera or sdguide.org.

Show that you are valuable.
As I want to stay in Vienna and the Journeyman concept is hardly known here, I have to convince some companies. Obviously there are benefits in having an outsider in your team for a few days. I start the "convincing" with describing my skills and enclose a current version of my CV that shows my experience and my willingness to teach, for example I list my talks at local user groups.

An outsider has a fresh perspective.
Even an outsider can provide valuable input. This is the main argument used by German coach Ralf Westphal who did a Journeyman tour this spring. This input might be some piece of code or just a second opinion during pair programming. As an outsider I am not affected by organisational blindness and can reflect on structures, assumptions, conventions and behaviour without adhering to company policy or any personal interests. I can share my views on coding, design, architecture, development process and anything I see during my visit. My host will benefit from my visit.

Help with Agile practices.
Related to a fresh perspective, I offer to help my hosts with Agile practices like TDD or pair programming. I will not run workshops or give polished presentations, but obviously I will practice with my pairing partner. I also offer to give a short presentation about the Journeyman concept and Software Craftsmanship in general which I have given several times since the beginning of my tour.

My friend Thomas Sundberg pointed out that managers of development teams who want to introduce pair programming or TDD into their teams should be interested in hosting Journeymen. By working closely with someone who has experience in pair programming, the developers will get a first impression of how it is done. This is especially valuable if they have absolutely no prior experience.

Knowledge is spread effectively using Pair Programming.
All the things said about outside view are even more true in the small world of a (programming) pair. As much as you hope to learn by pairing from a stranger, as much the stranger will learn from you. As the Code Cop I love unit testing and clean code. I do not know the domain I will be working in, but I know testing. My pair will know his or her domain, but maybe not how to create a good unit test, so we will work together on the domain with good tests. The same is true for clean code. One of my hosts invited me for exactly these reasons. The managers of the development department had tried to grow an atmosphere of professionalism and supported pair programming and TDD but the development culture had not changed. Of course my visit did not change it either, but at least I told the developers the same things their managers had been telling them and a few developers experienced these things while pair programming with me.

Spread the word about your tour.
As Corey said in his email, it is crucial to show what you are doing. It probably helps if you are well known like Corey or Ralf, but it is not necessary. I did not write any technical books nor do I speak regularly at conferences. I just started my tour with writing about my idea and added smaller posts on the way. People who wanted to pair with me showed my blog to their boss to explain the concept. I got invited to Germany based on the fuzz I created on Twitter. You should tell everyone about your tour in advance, present it at local user groups. You need to do some marketing. For example Ralf Westphal had his tour published in a high-circulation developer magazine and got much more offers than he had planned for.

You need a champion vouching for you.
In my experience the most important fact is the "mole" inside the company. Someone who understands the idea and wants to work with you. In the end he or she has to convince management and possibly vouch for you to be admitted. This person is a like-minded individual, someone whom you know from user groups or conferences. Especially Craftsmanship related activities like Coding Dojos, Code Retreats or Software Craftsmanship conferences are the right place to meet these people. As Daniel Temme wrote, his tour was based on people he had met during the SoCraTes 2013 conferences a week before. Saying that it is high time to say a big thank you to all the people that believed in me and convinced their managers that I would bring value to their organisations. Thank you all, you rock!