Summary
It was learning combined with fun for me. Thinking about writing code with smells, thinking about the mistakes that I might make everyday while coding and thinking about the things that I might tend to ignore during development was the real fun.
We all had good time going back to the roots and questioning things like “Why is long method really a smell”.
This was one of those times where we tried to move beyond “gut”, instead of saying “I think I can create an inheritance hierarchy here”, we focussed on “what is wrong with the current code”. All of us realized “the more we go into reasoning about problems in the code, the more the code smells become clearer”.
A few things that you might want to take care of, in case you plan to play this game with your team -
- Don’t rush. Reserve good 3 to 4 hours for playing this because the idea is to learn
- Try and have well balanced teams
- Being remote makes it a bit challenging to get feedback and reactions. Ask all the participants to turn their camera on
- Ensure all the code smells in a question are clarified to the entire audience before moving on to the next question
- Plan proper breaks in between, I didn’t
I hope you enjoyed reading, feel free to share your feedback.