In-company Dojos

Hello everyone.

Last Friday, I was invited by Kiko to São Carlos to organize a Coding Dojo at his company, Async. As usual, the Coding Dojo practices was a bit hard at the beginning but pretty quickly, the team started realizing how hard it was to think about software solutions collaboratively. The interesting part is that those are free and open source software developer. However, there is very little in their work methods that really gets them to collaborate on very short periods.

They stated that the Coding Dojo is an amazing experience to meet your collegues. Obviously, they work on the same room but they ment that the Dojo helped them understand how their co-workers thought and solved problems. Obviously it also showed how TDD (Test Driven Development) can help find errors and drive their designs even if they were pretty much skeptic about it at the beggining.

I am starting to consider a Coding Dojo as an amazing practical way to demonstrate the benefits from TDD, from quick "releases" and pair programming. It also teaches how to deeply collaborate with other programmers both teaching them new ideas as well as learning from them and follow their ideas. I believe that if it was only the capability to adapt your ideas to someone else's, the Coding Dojo would already be amazingly valuable to most teams. I would, therefore, suggest it as a consulting exercise to new and old teams. Still have to see the future effects it will have to Async's team but I believe communication between them can only improve.

I'll wait and see but will surely apply it to future works. I suggest you try it at your work if you have the opportunity and if you need someone to help you, please contact me. If I cannot go myself, I will try to point someone else.