OOPSLA 2006: Design Fest Round 2
As I mentioned earlier, I had attended the day long DesignFest session at OOPSLA my first day there. Since the whole experience picqued my interest, I decided to go ahead and attend a second session on Tuesday afternoon in an effort to perhaps inject myself more, and give it another shot.
I spotted Eric Evans sitting at one of the tables, so I decided to join them in hopes to get to see Eric tackle whatever design problem that was given, but unforunately he was only a moderator so he couldn’t participate much. 
At first, things started a little shaky as they had at the previous DesignFest, although (thankfully) we all agreed on certain ground rules at the start, such as not being concearned about performance and such. There was quite a bit of debate on certain designs at first, and Eric even commented a bit that he felt like it was “maddening” because he couldn’t jump in and start working on the design with us. 
However, as time passed, we tended to find lots of common ground in our design, and suddenly everything began to mesh together in the design and it began to rapidly surface. We began quickly sketching out various sequence diagrams to show the object interactions that completed different user stories, and very interesting designs began to emerge.
The session wasn’t as long as the first one I attended, only being half a day (I believe the duration was possibly 3 hours or so). The interesting aspect was that despite the short amount of time, we actually accomplished quite a bit more than the team I was on did the first day.
Not to say anything bad of the team members of the previous team I was on, it really just boiled down to team cohesiveness. Although we were a little disjointed at first (as to be expected with a group that doesn’t know each other), as soon as we all broke the ice a bit, things began to run a bit more smoothly.
Another insight I gained from this is just about every group has “The Leader”, someone who tends to dominate the discussion at first and kind of drive the team. However, although we did have a “leader” at first, the role kind of melted away with many of us taking turns with the role, and sometimes even seeing it disappear entirely. The result was we were able to collaborate quicker and easier.
Definately a great experience.
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