An Ode To The Pivotal Dojo

First it is ironic that I am writing this post about Pivotal my old employer as a Googler. So please remember that these thoughts are my personal opinion only and NOT Google's. 

Recently I got to legitimately reminisce about my early years at Pivotal. 

Dojo

A dōjō (道場, Japanese pronunciation: [doꜜː(d)ʑoː]^{[note 1]}) is a hall or place for immersive learning or meditation. This is traditionally in the field of martial arts, but has been seen increasingly in other fields, such as meditation and software development. The term literally means "place of the Way" in Japanese.

From my perspectives here are the 5 key tenets of the DOJO methodology. 

1. Immersive Pair Programming- we used to call this -  I  do, We do , you do. The intent here is to teach them how to fish and not merely assist them or do it for them.  Pair programming resulted in both enablement and delivery. 
2. Communication, feedback  and quick decisions. Run the team like a product team. There are typically 3 phases of the Dojo. 
• Framing, Discovery, Inception  (structured discovery - user interviews, pain determination, user journey mapping - think PM activities)
• Iteration Planning Meeting, Weekly iterations and retrospectives 
• Outception and closeout 
3. Need to demo every week - no exceptions. Ceremonies are important they serve a meaning a meta-purpose
4. Tight team of 3/4 engineers both on customer side and DOJO leader. 100% full time committments no partial allocation.
5. Duration no more than 4-6 weeks. If longer project begins again. no exceptions. Longer projects become staff augmentation projects not DOJOs
6. Let the customer developers and architects shine. Make them the heroes. Structure the DOJO as a product aka platform as a product. Think about users aka developers and apps. Outside in thinking etc. 
7. (bonus) CI/CD, Automation, Pipelines, XP - automation in everything -think about Day 2 and Day 1 ops 

If you truly want to drink the Dojo Kool-aid read Radically Collaborative Patterns for Software Makers

There are also downsides to the DOJO (expensive, not flexible, myway-or-the-highway, pair-programming all the time does not work, talented developers may get bored,  early developers may find it too tough, customer not ready for transformation and full on immersion, no half-way, tdd-is-too-restrictive) - but that is a  list for another day.