Ye Zheng wrote quite a detailed account (in Chinese) about our first CodeJam in the Beijing office already, so I’ll just be brief. I had a great time pairing with other colleagues that I haven’t worked with before. In hindsight I was quite amazed how much we accomplished and how smooth it went.
I saw many Agile practices condensed, surprisingly well, during this exercise. Examples:
- story and bug wall: a great tool for the Business Analysts and the client to have conversations and prioritize them
- TDD
- stand-up meetings twice a day
- a mini-retrospective without the voting but just bringing up suggestions to improve
- switching pairs to spread the code knowledge (for me, 3 times during 2 days). Even for a short project like this, even though there isn’t a lot of historical knowledge. When my pair knew about the acts_as_authenticated plugin and how they tweaked it, and I knew about one model object, Textmate, and a few rake tasks, we both became much more efficient when working on the next story.
- CruiseControl.rb was set up and reminded of files that I forgot to check-in
The client, the Director of IT of a non-profit organization dedicated to rural education in China, seemed to be very grateful for our volunteer work. The quality and the amount of value we delivered to him seemed to have exceeded his expectations too.
Quoting him: “What you guys did will definitely be of help to us, and I can’t thank you enough. You let them all know that!”
