COVID-19 has changed our life from one day to another. For me this meant that within a few days all of my upcoming onsite BDD courses got cancelled. Not a good perspective if you are a BDD trainer like me. But after reviving from the initial shock and having some discussions with fellow trainers I figured out a way how to practice even collaboration techniques like BDD at online/remote courses. And it worked. I have just finished my first online BDD training successfully. Now it is high time to summarize and evaluate.

Let’s start from the end. As usual, I prepared a feedback form for the course attendees and this time I also asked them about the online format. I received quite a lot of positive feedback, but probably the one I liked the most was the following:

“I was very impressed by how well this remote session went. Unfortunately we couldn’t go for a beer together, but aside from that I can’t think of any suggestion for improvements!”

Of course it was exhausting to achieve this, but such a feedback compensates all the pain. So let’s see how it was made.

Background

Actually I have already delivered online instructor-led training courses a few times, but those were done in a way that all remote participants stayed in the same meeting room so they could work in groups, interact with each other and also help each other when needed. I was not really impressed with the result. It was okay, but since I was connected with a single meeting room computer only, I could not see their reaction and because of the shared microphone on their side it was sometimes hard to understand what was going on. In spite of the same course material, my courses are never the same, because I always listen to the questions and reactions of the attendees and modify the focus, the explanations and sometimes even the exercises of the course accordingly. Without feedback this did not work, so it was more difficult to make the course really engaging.

So these occasions did not convince me regarding the online format, but at least I gathered some experience how to do group exercises (we used the break-out room feature of Zoom for that) and how the collaboration exercises that are usually done with paper, posters, whiteboard and sticky notes can be ported to the online platform. I used shared Google sheets, shared Google documents and experimented with exercises that need more than just answering some questions by typing in some text, but arranging, completing or coloring things.

Break-out groups

One of the key challenges of training courses is how to make them interactive. People can learn by practicing only and a 3-day long presentation would be super boring anyway. Therefore good courses are all exercise-based. But exercises are not enough alone, they really work well only if the participants can discuss their solutions with each other or even better if they can find the solution together. Even at a “traditional” classroom training this works the best with break-out group exercises, but at an online training course this becomes even more important as it is impossible to moderate a discussion with 15+ people.

At a usual classroom training course you can form and change the groups easily, but in an online format, regardless of how nicely the tool (Zoom) supports you, it makes sense to use fix groups at least for a day.

Lesson #1: Arrange people to fix groups of ~4 and use the same setup through the entire day.

Probably random selection would work also fine, but I asked the client to setup the groups upfront. Unfortunately you can pre-arrange people to breakout groups in Zoom only if you know the email addresses they are registered to Zoom, so I just had the group setup printed out and in the morning I set up the breakout rooms quickly.

The majority of the people left themselves connected to the Zoom meeting also through the breaks (with video off and muted), so I did not have to reconfigure the group setup during the day except for a few cases.

The only challenge with the Zoom break-out rooms is that they cannot easily give a signal about their progress. There is an “Ask for help” button, but simple signals like “Raise hand” or the chat window only works within the group, so whenever I wanted to see their progress, I either had to join in to the groups one after the other or monitor their results.

Miro as a training platform

On one of the first days of my preparation, I had a call with Tom Walker and he suggested checking out Miro as an online collaboration platform that can be used for delivering courses as well. Miro comes with a concept of an infinite canvas called board and you can place different objects to these boards, like virtual sticky notes, text, images, shapes, etc. The boards are pretty flexible but still easy-to-use. I had some previous experience with Miro, but never considered it for training. With a quick check I realized that it can fit for the purpose quite nicely:

• It supports collaborative editing (all participants of a break-out group can edit the same board simultaneously)
• It supports a good variety of objects and formats, so I could “implement” all of my exercises on a single board, I did not need to prepare different google docs and sheets separately.
• It has got a nice pricing structure that fits to such situations.

Lesson #2: Create a Miro board for each group with all the exercises. They can work on the same board throughout the training day(s) conveniently.

Miro provides many options so it is up to your creativity how you can use them to help the attendees reach the learning objective. It is useful if you can discuss them with someone, I had Seb Rose as a buddy. And of course never forget to…

Lesson #3: …solve the exercises yourself as well.

Timing and announcements

These days are not only about working in home office, but most of us have the entire family including kids at home all day long. So the attendees have to synchronize their lives also with their family. For this purpose, I thought I would take care of the timing more strictly than I usually do. (Normally I adjust the staring time of the coffee breaks to the exercises that cause a +/- 20 minutes variation.)

Lesson #4: Announce the breaks and try to stick to them as much as possible. Leave enough time for the attendees.

I inserted a 1-hour lunch break plus two 20-minute coffee breaks and I tried to start them at the announced time.

Lesson #5: Start the online meeting before the actual start, so people could join early and/or fix connection issues.

Also I announced that the course Zoom meeting will start 15 minutes before the actual beginning, so by 9am everyone had already joined and got ready.

Ask for feedback & improve

Asking for and listening to the feedback is useful anyway, but in such a new situation it might be even more important. Normally I only ask for feedback after the end of the course (2-3 days), but this time I already asked about their feedback already at the end of Day 1.

Lesson #6: Ask for feedback, make sure you have a specific question about the format.

After the first day one of the feedback was about missing the small-talks during the breaks. Obviously after sitting in front of a computer 1 or 2 hours long  everyone needs a real break. Me too. But I introduced the practice of coming back 5 minutes earlier in order to enable my camera and to have a bit of chat with people who were also back earlier. It is not the same feeling that you have when chatting next to the coffee machine, but at least something.

What’s next

My next online BDD course is scheduled for this week (this one is being delivered in cooperation with SmartBear and the Cucumber team) and I’ve got a few more inquiries for online BDD courses. I changed my next public course to online, so if you are interested how to collaborate with your team using BDD, you can also join.

COVID-19 changed our life, but collaboration and quality software still remain important. Why not to explore and exploit the possibilities of online platforms?

Stay home, stay safe…