Recently we  (together with Seb) organized a Code Retreat event in our company. It was not the typical event you see during Global Day of Code Retreat, for a few reasons. First of all, it was internal, only people from our company were present. Therefore, the diversity of tools and languages was not as high as usually. Then, it was organized during work hours. Finally, it was a Legacy variant.

What exactly was the point?

Some people might question, whether organizing internal company event of this type makes any sense. After all, one of the fundamental rules of retreats is attending them in your free time, only because you strive to improve your skills, not because your employer requested it. In our case there were a few reasons for choosing that format:

• We knew there are a few skills that devs from our company needed to improve (refactoring, following simple design rules, writing tests and testable code, etc.). We knew exactly what issues come up in various projects and decided that getting familiar with those basics is the first step towards making our codebase better.
• We didn’t have any training budget, therefore we couldn’t hope for getting a professional trainer. Even if we did, probably it wouldn’t be worth spending that money for learning the basics we intedned to cover.
• Many people work long hours, so asking them to do something extra in their free time seemed a bit too much. Even then, getting some people out of a project even for one day turned out to be extremely difficult, so we needed an official, approved event to allow people to spend some time learning.
• We wanted to provide opportunity for people to practice new skills. Making a presentation, organizing a “Lunch and learn” or anything of that kind, for sure wouldn’t work for us.

What did we do?

• We’ve got source code for JBrains’ Trivia game from here. We paired with Seb for one hour to get GoldenMaster done, in case some people don’t finish it during first session (proved to be useful:)).
• We organized a short intro to Git a day earlier (especially useful for short refactorings session).
• We run sessions, each 45 min., followed by a retrospective and break. Since retros between sessions were very short, not everybody had to answer questions.
• In the end we asked every person to share what they learned, which session they liked the most and what will change in their work from next Monday.
• After that we hit the pub for a quick beer:)

How did it go?

We were surprised and very glad when people said how many new things they learned from each other. Without any suggestions on our side, a few people said exactly the things we wanted to address, regarding changes in how they would work from now on. People also got very excited about what they learned, some encountered new tools that their colleagues were using, seems like the event left them hungry for more (which was one of our two main goals).

Of course, work is much harder than what we do during reatreat, in reatreat we don’t have databases, codebase is tiny, we don’t worry about deadlines and pressure from management.  So I’ll follow up on this, want to see whether people managed to implement those new ideas at work and what challenges did they hit.

Detailed description of sessions:

Session 1 : Golden Master – Create a test for the game, changing as little code as possible and covering the largest possible number of cases (challenge – change only one line). Keep the tests and use them in later sessions.

Retrospective questions:

• How much did you change?
• How many test cases did you cover?
• What challenges did you hit? How did you deal with them?

Session 2: “Make the code better” – Using whatever techniques you’re familiar with make the code look better (whatever that means to you)

• What do you think about this codebase? What problems did you hit?
• How did you change code (e.g. extracting methods, extracting classes, removing duplicates)?
•  How many tests did you add?

Session 3: Pure functions – Extract methods that do not have any side effects and state.

Retrospective questions:

• How many methods did you extract?
• What methods did you extract?
• How many tests did you add?

Session 4: Single responsibility principle – Make sure each class has a single responsibility.

Retrospective questions:

• How many classes did you extract?
• What classes did you extract?
• How many tests did you add?

Session 5: Short refactorings – There’s an imposed 3 min. limit for refactoring and covering your change with a test. If you don’t manage to finish before time elapses, revert your changes.

Retrospective questions:

• How many refactorings did you manage to finish?
• What did you learn in this exercise?
• Did you use Resharper and keyboard shortcuts?

Session 6: No mouse or short methods or eliminate conditionals – Pick one of the three tasks (or combine them:)): either do not use mouse or eliminate conditional statements from your code (ifs, switches, loops) or make your methods shorter than x lines.

Retrospective questions:

• Which task did you choose?
• How many conditionals did you eliminate?
• What techniques did you use (popular ones are using dictionaries or modulo function)?
• How many methods did you add?
• In the end, how many of your methods were longer than x lines?
• How many tests did you write?