We had a great ‘lunch and learn’ session today. Many thanks to BB&D for hosting the event and providing fantastic snacks.
Topics covered in the Open Spaces format included: ‘What is the role of the analyst on an agile team?’, ‘Is TDD a design activity?’, ‘How self-organising should a scrum team be?’ and many others. We ran a total of three sessions of fifteen minutes with between two and three topics being discussed.
Afterwards we had a brief retrospective where we discussed the session. SUGSA Cape Town is currently trying out a variety of formats and it’s useful for us to get the feedback that will help us inspect and adapt our offering.
What worked well
- It was felt that the sessions were better than being lectured
- Participants got to choose which topics interested them
- A change from the last event was that we had a second ‘market place’ for topics and that worked well
- The food (I did say the snacks were fantastic)
Could be improved
- A few people had difficulty with it being during office hours
- A two minute warning for the end of the session
- Name tags (This came up at our last session and I forgot about it, so thanks for the reminder)
- To vary the format and sometimes have a presentation format with a topic marketplace for that content of the presentation
So it seems we should ideally have a mix of:
- Locations (Northern & Southern suburbs and Town)
- Timeslots (breakfast, lunchtime and evening)
- Format (Open Spaces is working well but have some presentation format events as well)
