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Core Practice Discussions

Pivotal engineers would meet periodically over lunch to have a facilitated discussion of one of our core practices — the things we do every day. We made time for these discussions because the "why" of the practices doesn't often get communicated during pair programming, and we wanted to avoid developing "cargo cults" of people who followed the practices dogmatically without understanding their purpose.

The Practices

The core practices we discussed included:

  • TDD
  • pairing
  • retrospectives
  • Tracker-style project management
  • SRE incident review
  • standup
  • user research
  • inceptions
  • core practice discussions

Discussion Structure

Discussions followed a format similar to Lean Coffee Retrospectives. The facilitator would create several columns on a whiteboard with various prompts like these:

  • What is test-driven development?
  • Why do we do TDD?
  • When do we not do TDD?
  • What are the alternatives to TDD?
  • What makes a good test?

Participants would have several minutes to write their responses to the prompts, either on post-its or directly on the whiteboard. There would then be a few more minutes for dot-voting, and the rest of the meeting would be facilitated, timeboxed discussion of the top-voted items.