Foo Course: TDD

Learn TDD and help your team adopt it

This is a training course in Test-Driven Development (TDD). And it’s so much more. The focus is to make a lasting impact on your team, help them get started and adopt new and lasting ways of working.

Test-Driven Development (TDD)

TDD is a methodology and mindset that enables your team to create sustainable, scalable and qualitative software. TDD gives you an outside perspective on your code and helps you create better solutions that are changeable with less scope creep and fewer bugs.

What is adoption?

Adoption is a methodic framework for introducing new skills and ways of working in teams and organisations. It has a context-sensitive approach and takes into account conditions and motivation in the team or organization. The contrast is pull (“help people adopt new ways of working”) instead of push (“implement new ways of working in the team”).

Image: Example of areas to improve in a team to increase adoption, based on assessment. In this case, the identity of team members matches the new behaviour but status quo will be hard to overcome and complexity of new behaviour might be a challenge.

For managers and team leaders

Instead of spending money on training individuals to learn new skills that probably won’t get used, this course helps you invest in new capabilities and ways of working for your team.

Your responsibility will be to remove barriers, reinforce new behaviours and nudge the team in the right direction after the course. You will get recommendations tailored to your team’s situation and an easy-to-use workflow to follow.

For participants

Learn more than just TDD skills. The content of the course is focused on making it easy to get started when you get back to work. Your manager will have the tools to help you succeed.

How it works

Before the course:

Sign up one or more members of your team to participate in the course.
Before the course, participant/s and the manager/team leader fill out a form that assesses the team’s potential to adopt new ways of working from this course. Recommendations range from “course won’t help” to “course is unnecessary” with degrees of “course might help” in between.
The manager/team leader receives individually crafted recommendations and advice on how to experiment to remove barriers, reinforce new behaviours and nudge the team in the right direction.

During the course:

Content is developed to help participants get started as soon as they get back to work. It includes tips on how to influence other team members.

After the course:

You start adoption in the team. The manager/team leader experiments with making adjustments in context and supporting the team.
After a few weeks, the manager/team leader gets a follows up, evaluating skill and adoption progress and learning from the experiments. The manager/team leader then gets new recommendations and advice on how to move forward and iterate the experiments.

Why it works

Adoption framework is based on research by BJ Fogg from Stanford University, David Easley and Jon Kleinberg Cornell University, Cristina Bicchieri, University of Pennsylvania et al. The combination of training and adoption increases the impact in your team or organization. Here are the main benefits:

Recommendations are context-sensitive and take your teams’ or organizations’ conditions into account.
The adoption approach is holistic and looks at more aspects than rational benefits of the new ways of working.
Participants can compare can spread their new skills.
The manager/team leader gets tools and commits to supporting adoption of new skills.

Who is behind this?

Test-Driven Development (TDD) is the first topic within this concept of adoption focused courses. The concept is developed as a collaboration between Foo Café and:

factor10, thought leader and leading TDD expert in Sweden.

Sense/Make, experts in adoption, capability innovation and behaviour change in teams.

Foo Café is working on more courses like this, where we leverage the combined strengths of our network of experts and thought leaders to provide top-class knowledge and adoption of new behaviours and ways of working. Are you one of those experts or do you have a request for skills you want your team to adopt? Let us know.