Using LEGO to teach technical practices
Years ago now, Bryan Beecham came up with the idea of using LEGO to teach the concept of Test Driven Development (TDD). Since this is a topic most often used by developers, previous trainings had focused on demonstrating this technique on actual code. However, Bryan wanted to introduce it to a different audience; he initially wanted to explain TDD to management and then later to other non-developers on the teams. To do this, he needed to be able to illustrate the concepts away from the actual source code. And thus was LEGO-TDD first created.
LEGO Exercise: Collaboration
Most teams are a bunch of individual silos that have become good at passing work between each other. This exercise is designed to show how real collaboration is different from the way we normally work.
LEGO Exercise: Continuous Integration
Demonstrates the problems that occur when we don’t integrate frequently enough.
LEGO Exercise: Technical Debt
Demonstrates the kind of debt we accumulate if we don’t refactor as we go. This exercise will let the attendees experience the pain of dealing with technical debt, rather than just understanding it intellectually.
LEGO Exercise: Clean Code
Demonstrates the value of keeping the code clean.
LEGO Exercise: Test Driven Development (TDD)
Demonstrates the concepts behind TDD. How we write the test before we write code and how that forces our design to emerge.
LEGO Exercise: Simplicity
This exercise demonstrates the value of keeping the design simple and the code small. We’ll generally do this exercise before starting into any of the others as it’s really foundational for all Agile technical practices.