Exploration Through Example

Example-driven development, Agile testing, context-driven testing, Agile programming, Ruby, and other things of interest to Brian Marick

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Tue, 21 Sep 2004

Co-teaching

A long time ago, I gave up teaching conventional courses. You know the type: two or more days, 25 people in a room, lecture + lab + discussion. That works OK for learning a programming language or tool, I guess, but it doesn't work for what I do. My people have to go back and apply something like programmer testing to big problems. The fraction they retain from a course doesn't help them enough. Because they have trouble getting started, they don't, so nothing changes. Money wasted. Time for the next course on some other topic (since programmer testing clearly doesn't work).

So nowadays, when people ask me for training, I give them consulting. The actual lecture is short: I prefer half a day. After that, I sit down and work closely with real people on real problems. My goal is to get a core set of opinion leaders properly started, then let them train everyone else.

I've added a new twist, inspired by some co-consulting I've done with Ron Jeffries. We visit the client together, sometimes work with people together, sometimes go our separate ways, but always get together in the evening to talk about what we've seen and what we would best do the next day. Our sum is greater than our parts.

The new twist is that I now want to co-teach my consulting-esque courses. To that end, I announce two courses:

• Test-driven design, with Mike Clark
• Exploratory testing for the whole agile team, with Elisabeth Hendrickson

For more details, you know where to click. I imagine we won't teach many of these, what with persuading people to pay for two instructors and our varying travel schedules, but I bet the ones we do teach will be good.

## Posted at 18:01 in category /misc [permalink] [top]