tag: xp
Today I learned about “learning debt” in which code reviews cause negative feedback cycles discouraging people from taking the time to deeply learn a code base. This is due to biases around how people reading your code only seem to value the code that you wrote instead of the effort you put into learning what was necessary to make that code change effectively.
If only there was a method that flipped that narrative on its head. Some way to get code reviews while also encouraging and amplifying learning!
I am feeling the pain of not having a team to work with me on Coffee Time. It is very slow going. Motivation comes in fits and starts. I often wonder if I could have done a particular thing better. I wish I had the energy to grow my user experience capacity. But side projects like this don’t seem to attract people. I will have to go out and find! But where?
It is surprising to me how often I'm at work and trying to make the case for a particular new practice and some blog post comes up that makes my case for me. Just recently I was thinking about how we continue to maintain siloes even within teams and I was trying to make the case for pair rotation. Then this article on pair rotation showed up literally the next day!
An interesting data point from work — I paired with someone who previously inspected, async, code I paired with someone else on. After about an hour of pairing with me he noticed things about the code he had previously inspected and offered solid advice to correct things neither of us had noticed previously.
Anecdotally, then, in this case pair programming produced higher quality than asynchronous code inspection.
Very pleased I was commended today by my manager for advocating and teaching xp tools, including pair programming and test driven development. He expressed his appreciation in an engineering all hands. It feels nice to be supported!
No, it isn’t possible to have too much psychological safety. I’m very glad to have the reminder that this is the foundation of any work with teams. Especially ones that are right at the beginning of adopting XP.
It strikes me that this past week I've been playing fast and loose with the rules a bit too much. Mostly because the stakes are quite low if something goes wrong. So what if folks can't see my blog for a day? Nobody reads it that I can tell.
Looking back over my past posts, I realize I made a conscious choice to stop my TDD discipline for that one task. Fascinating how as the days wore on that conscious choice reinforced an unconscious habit to avoid the discipline.
I think it might be good to imagine the stakes are a bit higher and amp up my discipline again. I'll make a separate "xp" tag as a reminder and hopefully strengthen a new habit!
In which I admit that I chose not to use TDD and why. Trade offs!
more inside...Oooh look! I have a profile on wedotdd.com
Very nice.
A confession about how I broke this website by not using TDD properly!
more inside...The 6 team conditions framework seems like the work of psychodynamic therapy. The way my therapist puts it, the approach is for the therapist to create a space for the patient's mind to heal.
more inside...Work in progress
This site is part of a larger effort to bring more of my digital life "in-house" so to speak. So when something goes wrong I have only myself to blame. Ha!