The Current Level, Revised

Yesterday evening I held a talk about TDD at the Agile Hrvatska (Croatia) meet-up.

I was very pleasantly surprised. These marvellous things happened:

• There were a lot of questions through which I recognised my fellow developers were going through the same problems I went through. Therefore, I was not alone in wanting these problems solved.
• Some people showed beyond-basic knowledge of TDD, evidently having practiced it more or less successfully in recent time.
• The slew of questions which I was delighted to answer transformed the original form of a talk + later discussion into a 2-hour discussion backed by my talk sections visually aided by slides. This was a turn of events which I had not anticipated and it was excellent!
• One guy talked about his team’s experiments with BDD using the Three Amigos meeting. This blew me away. Not only were there people interested in TDD - there were people who actually explored more than me in some directions! This is awesome.
• The discussion did not cover just TDD. We also talked about BDD, refactoring, pair programming, the general workflow around tasks, specifications and testing, how to explain yourself to managers and other topics. What impressed me is that people seemed to have a basic grasp of all these subjects, knowing the relationships and interactions between them. Although few are experienced practitioners, all get the big picture.
• The whole discussion lasted for the full 2 hours of the planned meet-up time, after which some informal talks continued with snacks and drinks. I was under the impression that people were eager to discuss the many topics in and around TDD. Were there more time, we would spend it all.

So, this is the current level of Zagreb development, revised from my last assessment: Although most developers clearly have a fair bit of agile ground to cover, there is a number of developers who “get it” completely - technical agile practices go hand in hand with the management/workflow agile practices and it’s important to explore them and become a skilled practitioner.

All in all, yesterday’s discussion and the enthusiasm have given me new vigour in pursuing my exploration of the Agile landscape.

Many thanks go to all participants, and especially the meet-up organisers from CROZ who have given me the chance to create a spark in this flaccid agile darkness… (Okay, too much poetry, sorry… ;))

The most important stuff at the end: Stay tuned for more meet-ups focusing on technical agile practices and be prepared for a more hands-on experience next time!