A key concern of mine, as a Technical Leader is ensuring that knowledge is distributed on a team. Working on a large team makes that a challenge because so many changes happen at the same time, but you’re also dealing with multiple learning and communication styles. This means that one technique doesn’t work as well as another. Due to my passion for learning, I try to keep this in mind and try to ensure we use multiple channels for getting information to everyone.

One practice we’ve been experimenting on our project is one we call, “The Spike Showcase”. Spikes come from the Extreme Programming methodology and represent an investigation into an area the team doesn’t have knowledge of. We create one of these when we need to generate options for the business, or when we are dealing with a new integration point and want to assess the quality, testability, or best designs. That knowledge is normally take on by a pair and remains dangerously siloed on a fairly large team.


Image sourced from drubuntu’s flickr stream

The pair normally writes up their outcome on the wiki (for long term purposes) and they have an area where they can check in their code for reference, yet documentation is not very engaging and I know that most people on the team won’t look at the code unless they are going to work in that area because they are busy doing other things. Pair programming solves this problem to a degree, but on a large team would take a long time to distribute the information.

Our solution has been to hold a “Spike Showcase” where the pair who completed the spike hold a session with the entire development team, talking about what the problem space is, what they tried, and running through the design and solution. Depending on the type of problem being solved, the pair will use a white board to diagram the logical interactions, or show some screenshots of what they were trying to achieve from a business sense and then they will demonstrate the spike solution in action before finally showing the code and how it all works. We then run some question and answers with the team (allowing people to pull knowledge) before finishing up.

We have run several “Spike Showcases” now and I feel they are invaluable to ensuring a large team keeps abreast of various solutions going on.