Learning continuously and getting better

One of the implications of Agile is to learn continuously. All associated practices (retrospectives, short incremental and iterative cycles, feedback loop) aim at learning and improving. This is not only relevant for software production, but also for individuals, teams, groups or the company overall.

My opinion is that only by setting in place a culture of learning can we hope to really get better. Teams that learn continuously are more adaptive, ready to tackle new projects and unknown stuff. They are in a moving spirit, pushing forward innovation.

On the other hand, teams that do not practice continuous learning are more conservative, less open to trying out new things and innovating. There is an unconscious fear to change things.

Obviously this implies change (read my previous post on Change Management) and investment. It takes time to learn, it requires some efforts.

But there are tips and tricks to start setting up a culture of continuous learning. Let me share some ideas with you.

I started by introducing a cycle of mini-trainings: 30 min each week, with a different speaker presenting a short subject of his choice, more or less work-related, as a window for discovering new stuff. This is not mandatory but open to anyone interested. We have now done about 30 sessions. I will in the future share with you some of the presentations done during those mini-trainings.

Then we have our internal IT blog, where we are sharing a lot of stuff: our interesting readings on the web (from which I post every Monday), good practices, tips and tricks, presentations and so on.

We started doing pair programming (more or less successful depending on teams but still with some intention) and we will soon start a series of code dojos, where we will also be pair programming.

We have in place a developer exchange program with our Maltese colleagues. Every 6 weeks, a French developer spends 1 week in Malta working with a dev team there, while we have 1 Maltese dev coming over.

We have different trainings in place: one for our QA team to train them on technical topics, one for the dev teams on more theoretical subjects (check WCF or Performance that were posted some time ago).

I encourage my team to participate or speak in conferences, such as the Microsoft Tech Days or various Meetups (Alt.net, Agile.net…).

In addition to each dev team retrospective (again something that is not so well established yet as a practice, because French people do not really have that culture, but that we are working on), I organize every 6 weeks or so a global team retrospective to share and reflect on our practices and identify improvement zones.

We will add new ideas progressively (a Hack Day maybe in September, participation in external projects later on, Lab Days…).

And obviously I evangelized about continuous learning. Here are the slides, with first a bit of theory on learning, practices around the culture of learning, then examples of concrete initiatives to support that:

<iframe style="border: 1px solid #CCC; border-width: 1px 1px 0; margin-bottom: 5px;" src="http://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/embed_code/23835844" height="421" width="512" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" scrolling="no"></iframe>

As a bonus, let me share a presentation from  Tom Janssens, about getting better, that share many similar ideas on how to become a better developer.

<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=3,0,0,0" width="300" height="300" data="http://fr.slideshare.net/slideshow/embed_code/20091946"><param name="movie" value="http://fr.slideshare.net/slideshow/embed_code/20091946" /><param name="quality" value="high" /><param name="wmode" value="transparent" />