Technical/Engineering practices like refactoring and TDD (Test-Driven Development) have become mainstream in software development to deal with maintainability. However, these aren't commonly practised in companies. One of the reasons is the steep learning curve and requires years of experience learning from others to be competent. The other reason is most technical mentoring happens haphazardly, being ineffective or nothing. This talk is about the series of experiments to grow technical practices competency and exploring the subject of mentoring that can help to sustain the growth of technical practices in companies.

1. How I help others to level
up technical practices
stanly@odd-e.com
@stanlylau

2. Lives in Singapore
Software development coach / mentor
Agile Singapore 2013, 2014, 2016

3. http://www.marketingfirepower.info/the-minefield-you-didn’t-know-you-were-in

4. Early days
First attempts…

6. Photo: mint.com
Brown Bag sharing
TDD Coding Dojo

7. How I became better
Scrum Developer course

11. Experiments
(informal)

14. Alright, back to topic

15. Community Coding Dojo

16. Tried
• StringCalculator TDD exercise
• 20 people, most are new to TDD
Learned
• Most have trouble writing test first
• Questions of applying on their existing systems
• What if we focus only on refactoring first?
Community Mini-Coderetreat

17. Community Refactoring Kata

18. Community Refactoring Kata
`

19. Learned
• They felt confident changing code
• Inspired them to add tests at work
• They added and was unmaintainable
Community Refactoring Kata

20. TDD workshop followed by pairing
with team members for two weeks
Tried
• 70% lectures, 30% exercises
• Code exercises from public repositories
• Pairing happens random
Learned
• Pairing related to code were slim
• Assess the current state of automated build
• Some people were defensive

21. Pairing
Tried
• From an hour to 10 days
• Prepare a few topics
• Share with me their reflection/learnings
Learned
• Don’t know where to start in long method
• Draw/Model the classes
• Skills often mentioned

22. Pairing
Common mentioned skills
• Hotkeys
• Understanding Single Responsibility Principle
• Return null vs empty list
• Refactor multiple returns to single return
• Distance of behavior and data (domain object)
• Working with 3rd party webservice API
• Name closer to the business language

23. • Start with Code Smells & Refactoring Workshop
• Code exercises from product’s codebase
• Series of progressive one-day workshops
• One-on-one sessions between workshops
• Hands-on exercises then debrief
• Maximum of 8 participants
• Two co-leaders, me & another from the company
• Platform for growing mentors
Technical Training Program

24. Tried
• Took one week to create
• More than 10 exercises
• Remove code smells always
• Context limited to within the method
• Repetition + a little different
• Respectfully intrude and challenge
Refactoring Workshop #1

25. Anonymised

28. Tried
• Took more than a week to create
• Lesser exercises and repetition
• Context includes callers and call-ees
• New code smells
• Characterisation tests
• Simplify code using library e.g. JSONConvert
• Agile modeling
• Assignments as a pre-requisite
Refactoring Workshop #2

29. Agile modeling

30. Assignments as a Pre-requisite
Tried
• Part 1: Review a recent code that was refactored
• Part 2: Remove the smells in a refactoring kata
• I provide feedback about their code
Learned
• Excellent way to find out where they are
• Opportunity to hear their thoughts

31. Assignments as a Pre-requisite
“Actually I knew this code smell in my code but I
don’t know any good way to remove this smell, so I
hope I can attend workshop #2 to learn more about
refactoring.”

32. What aspects of the course were most
successful in helping you to learn?
“Explanation on speculative generality with diagrams”
“Trying out by ourself how to identify and refactor”
“Use Resharper hotkeys”
“Use real production code to practise”
“Approach towards a problem, especially all those shared
examples are very commonly seen code smells.”

33. What improvements to the course do you
suggest?
“More practice examples to be more familiar in
recognizing and tackle the similar code smell.”
“More examples on how to identify code smells such as
primitive obsession”
“Sometimes I am lost after the trainer expect me to do
the refactoring on the code”
“More sessions"

34. Supportive
Environment
Effective
Feedback
Being
Competent
Key factors of
helping others to grow

35. One more experiment…

36. Developmental Mentoring
Everyone Needs A Mentor by David Clutterbuck

37. “Mentoring is a partnership between two people built
upon trust. It is a process in which the mentor offers
ongoing support and development opportunities to
the mentee. Addressing issues and blockages
identified by the mentee, the mentor offers guidance,
counselling and support in the form of pragmatic and
objective assistance. Both share a common purpose
of developing a strong two-way learning
relationship.”
- Jenny Sweeney

38. Goals not limited to…
Able to apply clean code, refactoring, modeling, design principles
and design patterns [1].
Able to work effectively with legacy code and automated tests.
Able to come up and demonstrate with examples/exercises
appropriate for mentee's level.
Able to apply coaching skills of Accountability, Acknowledgment,
Articulate What is Going On, Challenging, Inquiry, Metaphor,
Powerful Questions, Intuition, Championing and Listening
(Internal, Focused).
[1]
Design patterns: Strategy, Template method, Factory, Builder, Adapter, Command, Mediator, Null Object
Design principles: S.O.L.I.D, Law of Demeter, Tell Don't Ask
Refactoring: The skill of driving refactoring by code smells and design principles.

39. Thank you
stanly@odd-e.com