Taking Baby Steps

Session 105'

Abstract

Teaser description

Have you ever wondered how much useful code you can write in 30 minutes? How about in 2 minutes? During this session you will learn how to remove waste by taking small steps towards incremental and iterative software development.

Goals

Find out why small steps are useful and when to use them. Learn how to take small steps while writing code or while refactoring code. Discover how you can discipline yourself to take small incremental steps.

Description

We will write code for a simple problem and then talk about what happened while writing code in small incremental steps. We will use a source control repository to commit whenever we can finish writing and implementing a test or doing a refactoring in 2 minutes. If we do not finish in 2 minutes then we revert and start over with something smaller, as a sign that the step was too big.

There will be three pomodorros (sessions of 25 minutes) during which you will work in pairs. After each session we stop and chat for a couple of minutes to find improvement solutions for our process.

You will need a laptop with a working and testing environment installed for your preferred language. This event will be language agnostic. Also you should have locally installed a source control software.

Timetable

• 15 min Intro
• 5 min Setup
• 25 min First session
• 5 min Retrospective
• 25 min Second session
• 5 min Retrospective
• 25 min Second session
• 15 min Closing circle, final retrospective.

Prerequisites

Laptops with working development environment, testing framework and local source control. Timer (a phone with a timer application is enough).

Materials needed

Projector, Flipchart.

Experience level

Good knowledge of at least one programming language.

Max participants

24

Speaker

Adrian Bolboaca