Learning Hours

A learning hour is a short training session for a group of software developers. They are led by experienced practitioners and structured according to good teaching principles. Each one has a specific learning goal - an idea to discuss or a skill to practice. Learning hours are designed to take about an hour, so you can fit them into your ordinary schedule alongside your other development work. Some teams do them once a day, others once a week or once a sprint. You can do them remote or in person, either should be fine. It’s a way to gradually introduce new ideas and skills into your organization.

A technical coach, team lead or enthusiastic developer should be able to use these learning hour plans to lead learning hours with their team. We in the Samman society want to encourage the spread of good technical practices like Test-Driven Development, and these plans are designed to be used by anyone who knows a bit about TDD and wants to spread it too.

Browse the different topics and learning hour plans until you find one that appeals to you. Before you hold it with your team you’ll probably want to try out the exercise(s) for yourself so you can help people if they get stuck. All the materials are released with a Creative Commons license which means you’re free to use them so long as you include the license and attributions.

In the book “Technical Coaching with the Samman Method” there are ten sample learning hours with four different themes. This site has the most up-to-date versions of them and a lot more learning hours besides. If you design a new learning hour and are interested in contributing it to this collection, please get in touch.