Nicole Rauch had been a strong supporter even before I actually came up with the idea of doing a journeyman tour. The German Softwerkskammer network has been playing with the idea of craftsmen swaps and Nicole worked hard to make that possible in the company she works for. Hopefully the example will inspire others to do similar things.
During SoCraTes Nicole and her partner Andreas Leidig had offered to host me and eventually got the OK from their employer msgGillardon to let me work there for a week. The company is set in the small town of Bretten, close to Karlsruhe. It's a very beautiful little corner of Germany and I was quite happy with the contrast of small town life compared to frantic Berlin the week before.
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| View from the top of the office |
I remain skeptical of frameworks that try to hide the complexity of visually representing an application. In the case of Eclipse RAP it at least seems to be thorough and consistent in hiding representation, which makes it more acceptable then Wicket or JSF (*shudder*). If you're happy to stick with what the framework provides and think in terms of desktop applications, as in this case, RAP seems to be helpful. But one of the drawbacks showed itself when we started to write Selenium tests for the application. The effort required to select elements to interact with made automating them too expensive.
FitNesse seems a little crude in some places but I liked working with it. I was missing support to generate code snippets, as Cucumber/JBehave/SpecFlow all do. Aside from that, writing examples in Slim tables fit very nicely for the domain we were working on. There was a lot of combinatorial complexity in the inputs and it looked a lot more comprehensible to have these in FitNesse rather than in java unit tests. It also allowed for a slightly easier active conversation with the product owner about the required functionality.
In terms of culture, msgGillardon is quite different to the start-up companies I've visited in previous weeks (and also quite different compared to ThoughtWorks and its clients). As a more traditional medium sized company working for a lot of customers in banking, things were a little bit more formal and the technology less bleeding edge.
Nevertheless, I was very positively surprised by the willingness to try out new things. (And not just the obvious experiment of letting some random guy show up there and work there for a week. With very convenient and simple organisation.) There seems to be a genuine interest in changing and improving and that is not something I'm taking for granted anymore.
The other thing that definitely stuck out was the diversity of the teams, at least in age and gender. I have no idea how that came to be but it was refreshing to see. I'd be curious if people there have found an explanation for why they are doing so much better than everyone else in Germany.
During the week I also had the opportunity to take part in the Softwerkskammer Karlsruhe meet-up. It was nice to see so many familiar faces from the SoCraTes conference. Nicole and Andreas were running a legacy refactoring workshop that was a very nice alternative to the legacy code retreat format. Like all good workshops, it left me with a lot of things to think about on how I would do things differently if I were to do it again.
This ends my journeyman weeks for now. I feel incredibly grateful for the privilege of having been able to do this. I am in the process of summarising the different experiences and compare and contrast them. I will hopefully also have some useful information for others who want to try something similar. If you have any specific questions or feedback, please do leave a comment, contact me on twitter or write me an email. I'd love to hear from you.
Pictures from the past couple of weeks are on picasa. Also check out Peter Kofler's blog about doing something similar in Vienna and Andy Waite's for something remarkably global.
