While I’m an avid player of card games and board games, the SEMAT card format does not reflect how I think about the alphas, which are a collection of states.

I’m working with 21 developers to improve their code readability. Through a code read-through, they listen to another developer try and read their code. (See Code Readability Process for more details.)

I invited this improv game themed around software development for some Brazilian computer science students visiting my campus. It’s a variant of the many reaction based, warm-up games (e.g. “Whoosh Ball”) that encourage quick response time and discourages over-thinking or planning a response. I like playing it with software developers because it makes more sense to them than these other games.

I’m sharing a pleasant surprise I had during a recent Test Driven Development coding session. My tests had found a design that was delightful to me. TDD suggested that I use a hash where my natural tendency is to use an array.

In my graduate course, “craft of software development” students created individual learning plans to accomplish their goals. Many choose to enhance their testing and design skills by focusing on Test Driven Development. (TDD)

Often as engineers we like to go for it alone. It’s me versus the machine. Yet, involving others can be helpful with us in our career. In my course “craft for software development” I challenged my students to think of ways to add a social component to their software development experience. Here is some of their feedback: (list is unsorted)

Sometimes people ask me, “what should I do to transition from my current career into a software development career?” Many have answered this question, but here are my suggestions.

When I first discovered improv, I enjoyed the creative play and sheer freedom it offered me. The basic tenets of improv gave me a safe place to unleash my creativity. The right side of my brain finally had an outlet. (I couldn’t draw or play an instrument. I did enjoy singing, but I knew not to do that in a public setting!) I enjoyed every improv exercise that was introduced to me. Finally, I had an outlet to be creative and to play.

What did you learn from the panel, and what are you going to do about it? Team Couch Potatoes / AppJour / ActiveMob Our experience with the panel this last Wednesday was of great help in preparing us for our solicitation of feedback from potential customers. One of the more important issues we addressed was that the customer panel had a difficult time, initially, distinguishing our application from that of our competitors. We will need to do a better job addressing what makes our product unique in future pitches if we want to keep listeners engaged. We also noticed that while not everyone was interested in using our application, those that were indicated that they would also be willing to pay for it. To us this means that there is a legitimate market for our application, especially for those that are already active. This was encouraging and should help us to focus our search for user feedback in the coming weeks. Team four of a Kind – In preparation for this week’s panel, Team 4 of a Kind planned a handful of new concepts for our pitch. We were looking to get feedback on both things that hadn’t been pitched in the past and to see if our older core features were compelling to new users. We introduced a name change on one of our core features from Quick Workouts to Fit Quests, a Virtual Buddy, and a pitch strategy that involved having the panelists actually go through a Fit Quest. Although the panelists agreed to do the Fit Quest, there was no feedback on how the quest felt or if the naming of the quest helped differentiate itself from the competition. A positive comment was given on the Virtual Buddy saying it gave an emotional and personal touch. This was also the first time several of the panelists heard some of the older features as well. One of the recurring pieces of feedback from first time viewers were that users felt our application had too much text, which suggests a lack of graphics. A few users also suggested the use of movies both as incentives and as tutorials to workout. Some of the same feedback that we had heard in the past that was repeated at the panel was that the fitness market already has a lot of competition and that this type of tool is too easy to cheat on. Finally, we also got feedback suggesting working out should be an individual activity and group challenges may just be a fad, which was one of our earlier discussions on deciding to emphasize quick workouts of group challenges.

This is about class three (June 1st, 2011) from the course (Real World Software Engineering for Entrepreneurs (A Startup Accelerator)