Manuela Munaretto introduces Women to TDD

Hi Manuela, you will be one the the mentor of our supercodelab for women, in partnership with Filippo Liverani and Gabriele Lana.

4 hours intensive practice event: would you give us a quick introduction to this lab?

I truly believe this is an amazing opportunity for all the coders to improve their programming skills in a safe and thrilling environment.

Our Codelab is a 4 hours intensive practice event, focusing on the fundamentals of software development and design. By providing developers the opportunity to take part in focused practice, away from the pressures of ‘getting things done’, the attendees would experience a significantly improvement in their coding proficiency.

The iterations will be carried out using Pair Programming practice of TDD (Test Driven Development) letting each participant choose the language and preferred paradigm.

Any iteration is made by 10 minutes of pair forming and 35 minutes of code session, followed by a retrospective; of course, to get the most from it, a prior knowledge of coding is requested.

 

You are a women in tech supporter: any practical advices to increase diversity?

We have to start thinking tech is not stuff only for men or for guys: tech is stuff for all the people. People are women, men, girls, boys, pink, purple, blue, green, yellow: more diversity is in teams, more strong are the teams!

My advice for women is: stop to judge yourself, stop to listen your imposter syndrome and start to think that you are as great as your male colleagues.

My advice for men is: stop to think tech is a job for men, stop believing that equal rights means being equals and start to acknowledge differences because these differences are the richness.

 

Any tips to the girls who never thought a career in software development?

Girls don’t be afraid! Computer science needs you!

Software development is not about playing with XBox, it is not about write code for hours during the night; it is not about eating and drinking junk food during the code sessions.

Software development is about learning new tools and programming languages; it is about realizing something useful for other people; it is about speaking with customers to understand what they really want; it is about discussing with colleagues  for the best implementation. Developer it’s a very hard, complex work but beautiful, funny, amazing, useful!

 

Notwithstanding Agile is 20 years old developing methodology, still it is not so largely widespread in Italy. Where does the issue lies, in your opinion of Agile developer, in developers or executives? Or both?

I think it is a matter of culture. Working agile means a wanted revolution in all enterprise levels: a deep and expensive change of mindset.

But, you know, in Italy there’s a saying like this: “those who leave the old road for the new, knows that loses but does not know what is.”

Maybe if our saying was: “when the winds of changes blow, some people build walls and other build windmills”…

 

What is the favourite soundtrack of your coding sessions?

It’s a long long time that I don’t hear music during my coding sessions because I work in an XP team and we work in pair! Anyhow music captures all my mind and I cannot write code without it !

But if I can say a name… Liguabue is one of my favorite singers!

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