I spent the month of January pairing with the Dell EMC Dojo team at the Pivotal Labs facility in Cambridge, MA. As I’ve reflected on the experience there are three things that come to mind.
Too Busy To Blog
The pace in the Dojo is designed to result in continually creating working code. Every morning the team holds itself accountable for it coding progress during stand-up. It’s no fun to give a status of “I made no progress yesterday”. Checking corporate email and checking your phone gets in the way of this progress. Any time spent in reflection and discussion on what was learned is documented and attached to the Pivotal tracker backlog.
My personal blog is a scratchpad where I reflect on what I have learned and share it in the hope that it helps others apply the knowledge I just gained. As a result of the pairing work style, I went a whole month without updating my personal blog. The main reason is that I didn’t have the time that I usually spend putting together my thoughts. It was all dedicated to producing the code.
Cutting My Typing in Half Was More Productive
During the pairing process, I yielded control of the keyboard while my pairing partner typed. In theory, 50% or more of my time was spent watching my partner’s keystrokes. It’s a bit of a paradox that typing less results in more productivity. During the month of January, my pairing partners and I downloaded more software and coded more prototypes than I had done by myself in the previous quarter.
Rotation Is Cool
After my first few days in the Dojo I arrived at work one day and was moved to a completely different project that I knew nothing about. I had been in the middle of debugging some problems that we had been seeing in some open source software that we had downloaded the day before. All of a sudden it became someone else’s problem and I was able to wipe my mind clean and focus on learning something new. This rotation approach resulted in my teammates and I developing a fluency in every project that the Dojo was working on. Having so many minds applied to the problem resulted in a diversity of viewpoints for coding which is not possible when working alone.
I have a lot more to say but there’s just no time!
Steve
Fellow, Dell Technologies
