My team and I are dealing with some code that NEEDS to be refactored and unit tested, I am planning on Creating a Code refactoring and Testing challenge. Just wanted to Know your opinions and points to make it more fun and effective, And what other things I could incorporate.
Ask HN: Do you guys in your development team do some fun challenges?
1–9 of 9 posts
Re: Ask HN: Do you guys in your development team do some fun challenges?
#2Is it imperative to do this in one shot? I usually do this in small peices when I have to. It's difficult to move away from feature development to address these types of problems. Create all the tickets and slowly feed them through your pipeline. I don't turn it into a giant all-hands-on-deck event.
Re: Ask HN: Do you guys in your development team do some fun challenges?
#3I'd start a parallel process where you check in with the team in specific ways relevant to the boredom-type issues you perceive. This could prevent you from causing the spread of one problem into two problems:
1) The need to refactor & unit test
2) The perceived need to take part in $team_motivator's challenge idea thing
I'd ask team members:
- How does this project feel to you lately (do they use words like boring / ineffective?)
- What can be done to make this easier on you?
- Anything else you want to do that's not this thing? (Like an unrelated project)
This should be a recurring meeting, where you check in over time.
This way you can remove your own ego-hero from the process, which is known to interfere and boost you while preventing the boosting of others' ego-heroes, thus handing control and interest back to them where possible.
Then what you can do is start to collect ideas, start an idea board, and feel for responses to your idea.
If your idea gets some traction, then you have authentic buy-in to your authentic idea and ergo--team permission & encouragement.
Good luck
Re: Ask HN: Do you guys in your development team do some fun challenges?
#4Genuinely, why not just prioritize the work?
Re: Ask HN: Do you guys in your development team do some fun challenges?
#5What's your role within the team? Sounds like this is less of a technical challenge, and more of a people challenge.
I was going to post about a recent experience doing an 'Oncall war-game'. Troubleshooting a prod issue -- the original person was a "dungeon master" that set the scene. Then the rest of the team tried to figure out what was going with the prompts from the DM. It was kinda fun and educational.
Re: Ask HN: Do you guys in your development team do some fun challenges?
#6Is it imperative to do this in one shot? I usually do this in small peices when I have to. It's difficult to move away from feature development to address these types of problems. Create all the tickets and slowly feed them through your pipeline. I don't turn it into a giant all-hands-on-deck event.
No.. it's not all hands on deck event... I was planning on doing these maybe one component/module per team per week, I have made guidelines and some general good practices that would reward points.
This would be more of a passive activity for the members, my team and I are new to software development as well so I was hoping this would be good for learning as well
Re: Ask HN: Do you guys in your development team do some fun challenges?
#7What's your role within the team? Sounds like this is less of a technical challenge, and more of a people challenge. I was going to post about a recent experience doing an 'Oncall war-game'. Troubleshooting a prod issue -- the original person was a "dungeon master" that set the scene. Then the rest of the team tried to figure out what was going with the prompts from the DM. It was kinda fun and educational.
We are a small team of new software developer. Just a member, and as such there's no definite roles.
This war-game sounds pretty neat.
Re: Ask HN: Do you guys in your development team do some fun challenges?
#8Practising chaos engineering on another team’s platform without their knowledge is fun /s
Re: Ask HN: Do you guys in your development team do some fun challenges?
#9Dividing and conquering where specific people are assigned specific source files / methods / etc can work well, and provide clarity to people who like that instead of expecting them to find / drive themselves.
Sometimes things are presented as a 'challenge' with 'points' and some prize in a lame attempt to gamify things. Pretending that it's not just work, and that a gift card will motivate people is kind of pathetic - it's just a normal part of software development work, the reward is that you get paid, and the software works and is easy to enhance and does what users expect it to.