Keeping your codebase clean is the key to affordable long term software maintenance and agility, but many teams struggle to prioritize good design in the face of changing requirements and looming deadlines. This one day event can help your team put matters into perspective and inspire them to improve their codebase.

In the afternoon I go through a coding exercise with participants, and we discuss what clean code looks like in this concrete example. We will use a programming language the participants are already familiar with, as well as code examples in other languages. To round off the day we spend the last 90 minutes playing a collaborative programming game called “Cyber-Dojo”. Programmers work on a simple programming problem in pairs at laptops, and every 5 minutes one half of the pair moves to a different computer. By taking the normal situation to an extreme like this, we quickly see the consequences if people are not communicating well or if the code turns into spaghetti. It’s a fun and informal way to bring up some important issues.