It was a pleasure and an honour to speak at the first Atlantec conference held in Galway, Ireland on May 15th.
I talked about cyber-dojo and showed some statistics from a random sample of its 30,000+ cyber-dojos,
together with a few examples of code/tests typically submitted, a few dashboard patterns, and wrapped up linking testing to Le Chatelier's Law and some of my favourite Systems Thinking quotes from Bradford Keeney.
do more deliberate practice
Do More Deliberate Practice is one of my entries in 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know.
cyber-dojo.org is the site I built where teams can practice programming.
Deliberate practice is not simply performing a task. If you ask yourself "Why am I performing this task?" and your answer is "To complete the task," then you're not doing deliberate practice.
You do deliberate practice to improve your ability to perform a task. It's about skill and technique. Deliberate practice means repetition. It means performing the task with the aim of increasing your mastery of one or more aspects of the task. It means repeating the repetition. Slowly, over and over again. Until you achieve your desired level of mastery. You do deliberate practice to master the task not to complete the task.
The principal aim of paid development is to finish a product whereas the principal aim of deliberate practice is to improve your performance. They are not the same. Ask yourself, how much of your time do you spend developing someone else's product? How much developing yourself?
How much deliberate practice does it take to acquire expertise?
- Peter Norvig writes that "It may be that 10,000 hours [...] is the magic number."
- In Leading Lean Software Development Mary Poppendieck notes that "It takes elite performers a minimum of 10,000 hours of deliberate focused practice to become experts."
- Mary: "There is broad consensus among researchers of expert performance that inborn talent does not account for much more than a threshold; you have to have a minimum amount of natural ability to get started in a sport or profession. After that, the people who excel are the ones who work the hardest."
- Peter: "The key [to developing expertise] is deliberative practice: not just doing it again and again, but challenging yourself with a task that is just beyond your current ability, trying it, analyzing your performance while and after doing it, and correcting any mistakes."
- Mary: "Deliberate practice does not mean doing what you are good at; it means challenging yourself, doing what you are not good at. So it's not necessarily fun."