All contending teams, without exception, experience a moment at which all members are standing around the table, looking at the robot; this is not what’s supposed to happen. Shouldn’t be a surprise, we told them in advance there would be bugs. Unfamiliar with the codebase and the hardware, it is now their job to find the bugs and fix them. They do know what the robot should do: ‘it should follow the black line, once you press the start button’.

We have been doing these robot challenge workshops for a while now. They’re great fun, for creating a shared understanding between business and IT, or experiencing an acceptance test-driven approach to software development. The mBot robots bring a highly visible aspect to the software’s behaviour.

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