Would you like to know how I do things?
Over the years, as I speak to other developers, or give presentations at events, I always end up with a lot of questions about “How do you…[x]?”
It occurs to me that there’s an awful lot of information out there about the ideal ways to do things, or about how things should be done, or even personal stories about how things are done, but there’s not a ton of people out there saying “This is how all this stuff works on my team, end to end, top to bottom”
Further, there always seems to be a focus on what we’re doing *now* with a lack of the context of how we got here and how we plan to go forward. This is how I do planning today. This is how I do testing today. This is how we do pairing today. The big questions from those that want to look at implementing these things are always in the form of “Ok, but how did you get there? How did you sell it to management? How did you get your team to buy in?”
Last year at KaizenConf the Dovetail team led by Chad and Jeremy did a workshop that they called, tongue-in-cheek, “Opening the Kimono”, in which they talked about how they are doing things with MVC at Dovetail, how they came to the decisions they came to, and how they have evolved what they are doing. They opened Visual Studio and showed their actual code. They walked through their process. It was, in its own way, beautiful, and it was a wildly popular session.
So I’ve gotten enough questions from enough people about how my team works, and how it got to where it is, that I think maybe it’s time that I open the kimono a bit and share.
The question to you, dear reader, is would this interest you? Would you like to know things like how we handle quality, how we implemented pairing, how we plan work, in short, how we run the team and build software?
Now the caveat here is that I’m just one guy, doing things on one team, in one company. My way is not going to be the way that works for everyone, and I’m willing to accept that I do a lot of stuff *wrong*. Hell, I know I do, because I have ample areas in which I can improve. But if real descriptions of how I do things and the journey to get there will be helpful to the community, then I’m willing to lay it bare.
So, if this interests you, leave a comment, or send an email, or hit me on Twitter, and let me know. If you have specific things you’d like to see me address, include them. If you think this would have no value, then let me know that too. I’d hate to engage in so much navel gazing if nobody will get anything from it.
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