As I mentioned in my previous post, I am now much more focused on business development. For me this means being an agile business (I’ll come to this later in a new post). As a piece of this I need a development team that is both agile and leading edge skills-wise.
It is interesting how things sometimes come together. JP moved back to Alberta and ran his Nothing But .NET course again here in Calgary and we sent one of our developers.
Sean Feldman, a Nothing But .NET and Sunwapta Solutions alumni, offered to come back and share with us what he has found in his development journey over the past while. So Monday, he is visiting Sunwapta and spending the day sharing his experiences with the in and outs of agile, object oriented design, domain driven design (DDD), behaviour driven design (BDD), development tools, etc.
This kind of sharing is invaluable. Why? Because having other outside perspectives on development best practices makes you revisit how you do things yourself.
You may have an approach or solution that works for your team. That is great. But maybe, your approach is not as effective or efficient as it could be. Or maybe something is about to change in your world. Knowing other solutions have worked for other teams can save you a lot of pain.
After all, only a fool does not want to learn from others’ successes and difficulties.
But all this training, discussion and knowledge means nothing if it is not accompanied by action.
Now I have always believed we have a good, solid development team. Sometimes improvements come incrementally and sometimes it’s time to raise the bar significantly higher… push out of the comfort zone.
Yes, it is time for the development team to sprint their skills forward again. The best part, we already have a good foundation, we have a good sense of where we want to go and now have some good projects to test the new skills on.
The journey is exciting yet again.
