The Happiness Door is a method of collecting immediate feedback I have read about some time ago on the Jurgen Appelo’s blog. I used it this year during my training sessions and it worked very well. I would like to popularize it a little bit.
This method requires to select a strategically located place (like the second leaf of the exit door) with marked scale (I use 5 smileys from a very sad to a very happy one) and ask people to put distributed sticky notes on a level corresponding to their satisfaction of the session. They are encouraged to add a concrete comment(s) explaining given score (like “boring” or “too little practical exercises”), but it is completely valid to just attach an empty card in the selected place. The mentioned issues could be discussed with the whole group to determine how the given thing could be improved best. I start getting feedback before a lunch break on the first training day and gently remind about it on every following break.
After my ‘Effective code testing’ training. (Almost) all attendies were pleased again :-).
Update 2015: I decreased a frequency of obligatory opining to twice a day (after a lunch break and at the end of a day) to save some trees and give the attendees more time to consider the things.
The main advantage of using this method is to get both instant numerical feedback (how much people like it) and concrete comments (what exactly do they (dis)like). The feedback is gathered very fast when there is still a room for improvements (in contrast to the more formal survey at the end of the training). I have got numerous comments from attenders that they like this method as well and I plan to use it also in my further sessions.
On my courses I even introduced a small enhancement to the original method. Every day I give away sticky notes in a different color. It allows to easily distinguish feedback given on a particular day and identify a trend. On the photos bellow for example it is pretty visible that after a feedback I got on the first day (yellow cards) I was able to adapt my training to the group’s level and expectations (blue cards).
Day 1 – a moderate result – the attendees didn’t get a training program in their company and expected something completely different…
Day 2 – a visible uptrend – I heavily diverged from the program to follow people’s expectations. Day 3 was even better :-)
This spring was quite busy for me as a trainer. I was a mentor at Git Kata – a free Git workshop, gave a talk about asynchronous calls testing on “6 tastes of testing – flashtalks” and recently did a short workshop about Mockito at Test Kata. In the meantime I conducted two 3-day training sessions about writing “good code” and plan one more Test Driven Development session at the end of June. Everything together with my main occupation – writing good software and help team members to do the same. What is more recently I’ve got very pleasant information that my presentation proposal about Mutation Testing was accepted and at the beginning of July I will close this training season speaking at Confitura 2013 (which nota bene was sold out (1200 tickets!) in less than 2 days). See you at Confitura.
Confitura 2013 – Speaker
Solid Soft 