Another process I’ve been trialling I wanted to share:

Sometimes when you want people to try something new you need to be a bit pushy to get them out of their comfort zone. This is where Push groups get their names.

Push Groups are structured sessions designed to encourage and facilitate the adoption of new tools and technologies within software engineering company. These groups typically consist of 3-4 people from different teams who come together to learn, install, and practice using a new tool or technology.

In the session is “very” hands on. We generally start with the installing the tool on everyone’s laptops, then run through some exercises that participants are required to complete in front of the organiser and share their immediate feedback of why the tool does or does not work.

This serves two purposes

1. It pushes people to try something they otherwise would not have
2. It gives the orgnaiser immediate feedback of issues they might not have know

In one example where we used this, we noticed many of our engineers in one area where not using customs shells they were just using vanilla Bash terminal on Mac or Powershell on windows. So we ran a session on Terminal tooling with ohmyposh, windows terminal etc. (we did a separate session with other tech for mac users, I’m using the windows one as an example because its the one geriatric old me that’s familiar with windows tooling ran).

In the first session we got them to install it, pick their themes/fonts (a bit of fun), try some common tasks, like git clone and run one of their repos using npm cli etc. demoing common quality of life features like git/k8s/etc information in the cli, statement completion, etc.

During the session one of the of the devs raised to me, he said: “Look, this is cool, but I never use the terminal outside my IDE, I only use it inside. I then realised its a totally different setup to customise the terminal inside the IDE, but in the session we worked it out and updated the content so that we supported both.

After the session there’s two goals

1. Use it! – try honestly to use this new thing over the next two weeks, push yourself a bit to try it. And provide feedback about what does and doesnt work.
2. Run another session for your team the same – even if it doesnt work for you, and get them to do the same thing and provide feedback

Most of the time we find that tools that are useful take off and reach critical mass and become ubiquitous, sometimes though things dont work, and that’s ok, as long as you get the feedback and learn.