Our team recently got together for a hackathon. I wanted to share both my experience being a part of that, and my thoughts around the impact the hackathon had on the team.

First of all, the hackathon was planned as a 1-day event (during business hours). It was presented more as an optional event; namely, participation was encouraged but not required.  We started the day by going through our usual agile ceremonies – Daily Standup, Parking Lot, getting coffee, checking e-mails, etc. The team later regrouped in a large room that was reserved for the event. A few members began to pitch ideas, briefing describing the concept and promoting the benefits while other members asked questions and focused on design and implementation options. After more ideating, the team broke for lunch.

After lunch, we realized we had but 4 hours left in the day which shifted everyone into high gear! We settled on the idea that had the most support across the team and began working in parallel. Members from the development team asked clarifying questions. I helped to identify and prioritize scenarios and walked us through the end-to-end flows from a user perspective. I paired with another member of the team on creation of a flowchart to help identify the expected flow, including specific user actions, decision points, and some of the business rules.

A couple of hours into the hackathon, after working intensely and collaborating on the tasks described above,  the development team compiled the code and gave a quick demo, soliciting input from everyone on the results. We worked together on cosmetic issues (i.e. changing the text displayed, removing placeholders) and identified which specific values were likely to change going forward and thus should be configurable. An hour later, the team did another demo and we identified more tweaks that were needed. After a few more rounds of iterating on our product, we decided it was time to go Live. We ran functional tests manually which passed; everything looked great! Everyone on the team cheered, laughed, some sang songs, but we were all extremely happy that we had accomplished exactly what we had set out to just a mere 4 hours earlier!

In summary, the team hackathon was a smashing success, not just because we solved a problem that will streamline manual processes and increase efficiency and responsiveness going forward, but more importantly, because it encouraged team bonding and fostered collaboration, while promoting an agile mindset and approach to development.