How our Company Benefits from Developer Learning Weeks

The idea was simple. We have 3 week sprints. We release every 4 sprints. That’s 12 weeks each release X 4 releases = 48 weeks. That leaves 4 weeks out of the year to make it an even 4 releases per year.

Since discovering this convenient math, I used it as a way to plug the idea of getting 4 learning weeks for us developers per year immediately following each release. The result was exactly that, plus a PluralSight login for each of us. We do our research a week or two ahead of time to determine which classes we would like to take, and we each create a document of our plans. The plans include what courses or other research we plan on doing, and how the results could be applied to potentially benefit the software and company.

This learning week has led to better communication within the development team, as excitement about learning new things runs high. Many times, courses with similar topics will be watched by different developers, and new ideas shared and compared.

There were two consecutive learning weeks where all developers studied nothing but unit testing, and had many mob programming sessions attempting to unit test and refactor copies of existing code as practice for upcoming sprints. Michael Feather’s “Working Effectively with Legacy Code” and Roy Osherove’s “The Art of Unit Testing: with examples in C#” were both utilized in addition to online courses and research. A lot of decisions were made and obstacles overcome. It was a productive and eye-opening experience.

We also use this time to keep ourselves up to date with the latest and greatest techniques and programming language offerings for the current IDEs and languages that we use. We always come out of learning week with at least a few more useful tips that start getting used immediately afterward.

I can’t say enough about the amount and quality of so many of the courses that anyone can find on PluralSight. Of course, many times a course will get paused to either try out what was just talked about, or look much further into a topic elsewhere. I truly believe that we get so much more out of this than when I used to get sent to a classroom once a year. Especially when all of our coworkers can pause and discuss at anytime, and go at their own pace. Anyone can either deeply learn and get very knowledgeable about a topic, or breeze over many topics in search of higher level knowledge for making decisions about what is worth digging deeper into later.

Photo by Martin Robles on Unsplash

I don’t see this as a replacement for reading books and blogs and keeping up to date at home. It is very much a group experience that is not experienced in the same way during the development process. To me, it’s sort of like being in a band. You practice (or study) at home to keep your skills and individual knowledge up. When you are developing for work, it is a gig where you are to perform your skills with some exploration to reach your ultimate goal of satisfying the crowd (users) with results. Learning week is like band practice where you develop your skills in a group setting, discussing what works best in preparation for future gigs.

At the end of the week, we have a final meeting where we all present a summary of what we actually learned and how we can or will apply those learnings. A lot of times developers will show interest in other developers’ courses and take the same ones the following learning week. If a topic is big enough, plans will be made for implementing something newly learned in the weeks to come.

Summary

In conclusion, we have benefited from learning weeks with higher quality code, better and more efficient use of tools, and closer relationships within the development team. I would highly recommend finding a way of injecting this practice into your company. It is a benefit that will help developers’ motivation, satisfaction and performance throughout the year.

How our Company Benefits from Developer Learning Weeks was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.