Learning day

Today my company arranged a Learning day in the format World Café Method which was really positive. In short all employees gathered together during the afternoon for discuss different topics in small groups. Every topic was introduced with a lightning talk followed with intense discussion's and sketching (every table were prepared with paper, pencils and questions). The idae to time box all sessions made everyone focus on what they wanted to say or/and ask. There was lot of energy in the discussions....really positive.

So why do I even write about this? The idea is nothing new. I guess it's more popular today when all companies goes agile. I will tell you what I though made this something extra.

Findings

We wrote down on the table what we discussed and in the end of every session we were asked for what findings we had done. Like a really short retrospective. If I only had discussed and afterwards went back to my desk, it would have been like a long coffee break.

People

I meet new people in my company. Instead of sit with my colleagues, I put myself outside my comfort zone and sat down with colleagues that work with something else in another department, like project managers, configuration manager, line manager, etc. I already know what my closest colleagues think and would say; because we see the same side of the coin.

My lifetime chance

I had my lifetime chance, but I turned it down

In the beginning of this summer I was offered a dream job, but I turned it down and I will tell you why.

What's a dream job

A dream job is something very unique, you and I have probably different ideas what that would be. What we do have in common is that it is something that we really want to have. It might not exist, or we are not aware if it does, or it exist very few of them. Probably its something that is really hard to get.

Something else that also could be said about a dream job, is that it gives something to you. It could be lot of money, a carer opportunity, working with latest technology or  something really interesting and motivating. It could also be so that it requires sacrifice from us that we are not willing to give.  

The first contact

In the beginning of the summer I was contacted by a recruitment firm and they were interested in my profile for a potential job position. This wasn't the first time I have been contacted, but I am a open person, so I always listen.  

-Wow! Is this for true? Does a such job exist?  Does they really want me?  

That was my first thoughts.  

Note: I have a good job with great colleagues and benefits, so I am not desperate looking for a new job, but I always listen if someone offering me something better. The "worst thing" that can happen is that I have to practice to market myself.

I discussed the offering with my family if I should proceed or not, mostly because it would require time away from my family and it was a international company without a office in Sweden (the purpose was to start up a business in Sweden). I decided to proceed. It sounded as a dream job and a lifetime chance. I updated my CV, mailed it to the recruitment firm and then the process started.  

The interview process

During one and a half month there were several interviews over phone and Skype, with the recruitment firm, potential manager and colleague and they all went well. Afterwards it was time for a test were my technical skills should be verified. I did really well (has I been told). It felt great and I actually started to believe that this was something for me, but also I was something for them.  

Because this company don't have any office in Sweden and I am full aware of differences in cultures, I raised some questions early, so we (I and them) could stop this process early if necessary. It would later show that the differences were not understood well enough.  

After all phone interviews and the test, it was time for the first face to face meeting in a hotel room in Copenhagen. The interview process started to reach its end. If this meeting went well it would then mostly be about formal issues if we would come to an agreement or not. I went to the meeting, it was a tuff meeting. They throw questions at me and I tried to answer them as good as I could. There were no room for rest and I was under hard pressure. In the end of the meeting there were room for me to ask questions. My focus was to be calm and answer honestly on all questions. If this job change should be successful, it must be a win-win situation.

I believe the meeting went well and I had probably proceed to the next step if it not were for something one of the interviewer said. I won't go into details but it concerns something really important in our culture and that was one of the the things I raised early during the process. This was the end.

Summary

Why am I telling you about this? When you do business with other people and they have different culture, you have to do your home work. You don't need to understand the other culture, but you must accept there is a difference, words can have different meaning and what you value in life is not necessarily the same. If you do your home work well, you will have a better chance to be successful in your business.  

About the job role, I am convinced it was perfect for me (and vice versa) and it offered lot of new challenges and possibilities. Unfortunately there was a culture collision and I felt very sad to call back and say no. I got to taste of something that could have been my dream job.

Now life consists of so much more than work achievements and I feel strong and proud of myself that I turned the offering down. Even if I didn't got this job, I have learned a lot.

• I got to practice to market myself
• I learned more about international interview process
• I learned more about the importance of culture awareness
• I learned more about another company
• and the best part, I learned more about myself

Course reflections

Last week I hold my second internal company course, Coding standards and behaviors, with focus to make my colleagues more interested into the topic. In the end all attended had to give feedback on the course and it resulted in the image below.

Feedback from the course Coding standards and behaviors

And now some reflections...

The target group

The course was open for all who was interested to learn more about the topic. In the invitation I had included an agenda to reach the right target better. I do believe I did well with the invitation. I don't only want to have geeks in the audience.  I do know that the discussion get better when people have different backgrounds. Also, I get better feedback.

My preparations

I started with a pre-study about the course content 2 months before the actual presentation date and started preparing the PowerPoint presentation about 1,5 week ahead. During the first phase I tried to read and collect as much information as possible, e.g. documents, books and blogs. I tried to summaries everything in headings. The second and last phase was about sorting the important and most interesting parts into slides. This is the hard bit!

What I aimed for

The main focus was to make people more interested in writing safer code and using coding standards and coding style, as a help to achieve it. Also by being aware about strange behaviors (undefined and unspecified) in language, like C, are also helpful. I tried to have simple example but I also added a few more complex, with purpose to show how hard it is to understand some parts.

Was it appreciated?

This one is the tricky part, but I do believe it was based on three facts:

1. All the seats were filled the same day the course as announced
2. The picture above shove that most of the attendees marked it above average on the interest scale
3. I received some personal and positive feedback afterwards.

Because the target group was quit wide I expected some feedback were people thought it be not so interested or it wasn’t what I had expected. The questions are:

• Can I do anything about it?
  Yes, by a) more précised target group and b) more detailed agenda.
• Should I do anything about it?
  It depends. If I am asked to hold the same course once more I will probably update the course description. But in the same time I want to keep the content a little bit open, especially if it’s something new I have to do research in.

Why do I teach?

Because it’s fun! I also learn more about the subject when I need to teach it.

Some tips if you want to hold a presentation

If you haven’t held a presentation before, you should now that creating good informative slides take really long time. First of all you have to define two things:

1. What is your story?
2. How is the target?

The first one is a help for planning. Do you know everything already today? Or do you have to do a lot of research first? It also helps you to stick to the plan. The second one decides on what technical level you should have on your presentation. Is it a Java for dummies or advance cache optimization. If the target group is more senior, you should be prepared for trickier questions. They can even tell you that you are wrong :-)

When you finally start with the art of creating slides, here are some general tips:

• Stick to short and few sentences
• Pictures are nice
• Verify your colors on a project screen.
• Font size. can the person in the back read it?
• Style consistency. The layout should be similar between the slides
• Add questions (as a reminder for you to wake up the audience:-) )
• Avoid preaching
• Add some extra energy on the start end slide

Bigger retrospective - my first time

Finally I did it! I had my first bigger/higher retrospective. It wasn’t perfect, but I learned a lot.

In April last year I wrote a post on the internal forum at my company about Retrospective on a higher level, where I discussed that we missed some form of finalizing, round-up of each project. A planned time were all developers, testers, architecture's and manager sit together a put there view on how they thought it went. A possibility to visualize choices that resulted in good and bad,  from which we can learn from.

Why bigger?

Running retrospectives after each sprint is a great way to reflect after small changes. Maybe your team has tried pair programming or TDD for a sprint and then its perfect during the sprint retrospective to reflect over what everyone thought about it.


But during a project for several months or years it happens a liitle bit more:

• Several teams are working with different parts and the code changes a lot.
• There will be lot of communication ans synchronization  between the teams and managers.
• New way of working like remote-pair-programming.
• New tools are introduced .
• People leave the company and new people start.

This list can be made long. My point is that some changes a three week sprint is not enough to make reflection from. You need more input data to spot the delta.

My frirst trial

After I have read Joakim Sunden’s post, Running big retrospective at Spotify I finally moved from just talking about it to actually doing it. And it was great!

What I did was:

• I invited all how has been involved during a 6 month period.
• Booked a conference room for a hole afternoon.
• Prepared me well with agenda, post it notes, etc.
• No computer!
• Happy mode curve.

As I mentioned in the beginning the result wasn’t perfect, but it was ok. Unfortunately only developers attended, which only give one side of the project. What I missed was that several invited was invited as optional and not required. Yes, some people actually take notice of this.

The good part was I really believe everyone who was there really enjoyed it. One important part, that I also put extra care to, was that everyone should participate. It’s very common that there are only one or two who speaks all the time (some smart people sit silent in the back and don’t care about agile and processes). By letting everyone write down what they did during the gathering data phase, and put them on a timeline on the whiteboard afterwords, everyone got a chance to share there thoughts and feelings.

Another good factor was the happy mode curve. Everyone was asked to draw a “sinus curve” describing what they felt for the task during the hole project. Is was a clear correlation between the curve and “how well” the project went.

Another the last success factor was to not bring any computer. We did it truly kindergarten way. We used pencil and paper.

I will do it again!

Software Quality - Interest of improvement

In previous post I discussed if it's possible to improve the quality and the conclusion was: it is, which is not surprising. I also divided software quality into two groups, functional and none-functional, to make software quality easier to reason about (which it isn't).

In this post  and the next I will discuss what is required to improve the quality and two parts that are necessary are:

• interest of improvement
• knowledge of you current quality

Interest of improvement

Before you can take any actions to improvement, there must exist a interest of improvement. Normally a company wants good quality on it's products so the customer are satisfied and continues to buy/recommend the product. You want:

• the response time of your web browser to be than your competitors, else users will abandon you product.
• to be able to test the product continuously in a reliable way to changes can be made earlier
• the code to be clean and easy to work with, to make it possible to add new feature easier.

But all this will not happened by itself. It’s the people in your company that will make it happened. You need employee's that are like sports people that always seek ways to improvement. So how do you get them? Either you have been lucky with you recruitment or you have a company culture that endorse caring about quality and sharing knowledge. Geoff Schaadt has written an excellent post about How to make your employees care about quality. He writes:
“how do you make your employees care about anything? You can’t make them.”

It means that you can only create a culture that makes people care.

Different people
People are different and have different interest. We want people in our company and teams to be different, because it’s from their discussions innovations are started.
We want different people that are interested to learn more and a company that creates a caring culture.


In the next part I will continue with knowledge of your current quality.