A discussion topic brought up by Kevin Kuebler at this most recent Software Craftsmanship meeting was, "what can we do to improve the group?" The focus of the topic was in what activities the group could do that would be of interest to those in attendance. Some ideas came out during this discussion.

Working on a Project as a Group

The group tends to focus on practicing programming, pairing, testing, and other very programming focused aspects of software. With this exercise, the plan would be to spend consecutive meetings working on a project. The first meeting would plan the project and get started on the project with the second meeting being full of teams taking on challenges and practicing their software skills at all levels of development.

Deep Dive Into an Open Source Project

The plan here is to study and examine very closely exactly how the project works. Looking at what was done, why it was done, and deciding whether it was done well or could be improved in some way. This should be a very precise, careful look at the software led by someone who knows the project well enough to guide the group and knows enough to stay quiet and let the group figure things out collectively.

Fixing Bugs and Adding Features to and Open Source Project

What better way to learn about a project than to dig through the code adding features and fixing bugs? This exercise would involve selecting an open source project and cherry picking some bugs and feature requests from their lists. As small groups we can work through these.

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