Move-Around kata for team leaders

here’s an experiment for software team leaders: a set of katas (things you repeat exactly the same way many times).

let’s try to do the following kata once a day:

Move-Around

1. Get out of your chair and lock your computer
2. for each team mate that sits in your floor:
   1. Ask “can you show me what you are you working on?”
   2. see at least one technical document they wrote (source code, documentation, build script..)
   3. If you think they could have done a better job, challenge them to find a better way to do the job without giving them the whole answer
   4. This should take no more than 5-10 minutes per team mate but you can take longer if you like.

what other katas do you recommend?

Comments

[Yauhen Safrankou]

Go together with your team mates for lunches =)

[Andrew Siemer]

The best suggestion that I can make to any coder/manager is to pick up your head at least once a month (more frequently if possible) and go out and find a new technology and play with it. Especially the technology that you have a mis-informed or totally un-informed opinion on. Examples of this might include, Entity Framework, Linq to SQL, or Linq to NHibernate over Fluent NHibernate for those still writing all sorts of spaghetti code to map to SQL. Or ASP.NET MVC, NVelocity, or Spark for those that are still using pure asp.net webforms. Or pick up some patterns such as DDD, TDD, MVP for those still stuffing a 1000 lines of code into a code behind.

And for those stuck in one language (as can clearly see that I am!!) go out and pick up a different language to play with such as C, Java, PHP, etc.

The idea of a kata is a wonderful one. Take a simple task that you do daily, weekly, or monthly - and try to apply a different language or tool to the application of that kata.

[Lee Campbell]

I like the morning TDD kata from Roy Osherove's TDD masterclass. Great way to become one with TDD/Resharper/VS.