CCD Reflection 1: Red Grade finished

Today is day number 21 of wearing the CCD Red Grade wrist band and time to reflect on the last three weeks.

What have I done in the last three weeks?

• Several code katas
• A little pairing with one of our developers to find weird UI problems
• Initiated the first Coding Dojo in our team - we are going to do weekly Dojos now

How do I rate my performance on the principles and practices of the CCD Red Grade?

• DRY - everything was done only once, I give a high rating
• KISS - almost everything was kept simple or--even better--was made simpler
• Beware of Optimization - I can't remember any optimization but want to rate "not perfect" as I think that some shortcuts were made during TDD (two or more baby steps at once). And taking shortcuts is some kind of optimization as well.
• FCoI - my kata and dojo code was too simple, FCoI could not have been applied
• Boy Scout Rule - interesting experience: during a debugging session we walked through code and saw dirty places BUT at that time we were hunting a very specific system behaviour and did not want to interrupt this task by doing boy scout cleaning. Unfortunately we forgot to clean the code afterwards. Learned for next time: take a note of the dirty location and come back later to clean it.
• Root Cause Analysis - did not happen at all in the last three weeks
• Version Control - 50% done but not for some spiking code experiments and all my private katas
• Simple Refactoring - completely done as integral part of doing TDD
• Daily Reflection - thought about it but not very structured

I gave every of these principles and practices a value from 1 point (not done at all) to 5 points (perfectly done), see image.

Red Grade done, finished, or on-going?

The idea of the CCD initiative is to stay with your current grade until you are able to high perform on all aspects of this grade for at least 21 days in a row. My initial plan was to switch to the next Orange Grade after three weeks regardless of my red performance. I wanted to go on and focus on the next principles and practices - and simply keep in mind that I have to improve my red skills. Now I realize that CCD doesn't work this way. I want to prove significant success in the current grade to myself as a trigger to switch to the next grade. It would be meaningless to go on as long as I fail to apply the boy-scout-rule, root-cause-analysis, and daily reflexions on a regular basis.

I try to do daily reflexions from now on to get self-feedback early and improve my grade performance. To be continued...