What is the most fun bit of your current job? Mine by far is the way my current team is building up our shared knowledge pool.

In this project, we have run weekly one hour sessions to share knowledge inside the team. The topics have ranged from domain-specific issues to how to write acceptance tests with the Robot framework. As the team scrum master, I’ve mostly being MC for this session.

As a team, we have experimented with the format. The only fixed thing about the session is that it lasts 60 minutes or less. We’ve tried brainstorming/-sharing with a Miro board (worked surprisingly well), presentation format (worked ok to decent) and even mob programming using CodeCollab - An online real-time collaborative code editor and compiler for the web.. If something works, we will try it again. If it doesn’t, we’ll drop the format or at least adjust it somehow before trying it again.

While the sessions are mostly fun and demonstrably useful, the area that needs to develop is interactivity. Microsoft Teams meeting being the norm for interactions now, it is sometimes hard to get every one of us engaged in full. This is why I picked up two books by Sharon L. Bowman The Ten Minute Trainer and Training from the Back of the Room to add tools to our teams’ toolbox of learning. Let’s see how the format of the session will evolve as result.