Reveal the challenge on the day of the contest, and expose a set of more limited, and purely functional challenges:
- implement full text search “by hand” without using plugins or preexisting solutions
- create a batch processing workflow queue for arbitrary work items with complex precondition/postcondition requirements

In other words make it more of a programming competition not a contest to slap together a pretty GUI and a bunch of CRUD screens. Because that’s the type of thing that there are plenty of tools to assist with. That’s probably why I won: I planned in advance what tools we could use that would allow us to generate a basic CRUD app as rapidly as possible. http://www.lmcalpin.com/post/1109835129/dev-derby-2010

Limiting the scope of the contest would also be beneficial since it would allow us to make the judging more objective:
- Selenium test scripts could be used to verify that the GUI behaves to spec in response to changes in back end state
- expecting teams to create web services that expose internal state could be used to verify other system behaviors

Ditto on the awards.

Beyond that, I think monetary incentives and the application process give the competition credibility. Participants shouldn’t get caught up in the exact monetary value since building tools for the non-profit sector should have an intrinsic value.

Having a dedicated front-end team member may not make sense for every team. Our PHP team identified two people to develop the front-end because we were using a MVC framework. Someone who only knew HTML, CSS, and JavaScript wouldn’t have been much help without knowing anything about the framework we were using.

Ultimately, each team should be responsible for limiting the scope of the project. A team of 8 is going to produce more than a team of 2. The requirements shouldn’t be catered so that the smallest team can complete them. The smaller teams (and even the bigger teams) should cut out what they know they won’t be able to complete so they have something to present. All of the teams, including mine, did’t focus enough on having something to present at the end of the 6 hours.

Like I said in my blog post, I’m really glad I participated and would do it again.

Kevin, is the code going to be released on GitHub? I think creating an organization on there for participants would be a great way to continue development in our free time.

I would be particularly interested in scheduling a “design derby” a month prior to each Dev Derby. The format would need to be a little different than a 6 hour design session if the intention is to produce a quality challenge for an upcoming Dev Derby. But as we saw from our experience this time, it is possible to produce a design document in a week in under 10 hours of work that is in a state ready for the Dev Derby competition to use. We have enough designers in the area that we should be able to find more people interested in it than we did when recruiting for the design team this time, if it is during a different time of year. Being able to show the final design documents that were used should help in recruitment.

It would help both the design derby and dev derby if there was more recruitment and partnership with the School of Informatics and Computing in recruiting their students to participate. Specifically if faculty could assist in promoting this opportunity. As a student at SOIC, I was very disappointed in the level of student participation. There were quite a few students on the Java team from the cognitive science program. These students didn’t have experience in developing web applications and yet were interested in learning from this experience. The students that I tried to recruit to the competition didn’t feel like they had the experience to compete, when in fact, they probably knew enough. So either we have a confidence issue or our recruiting efforts need to be revised to emphasize it as a learning experience. All of the professional developers involved talked about what a great learning experience it was for them. I’d like to instill the value of service-learning and lifelong learning within our students at SOIC. Perhaps partner with the SERVE IT Community IT Clinic to.

Front-end teams. It appears that each team could have accomplished more if they had people dedicated solely to working on the front-end development. I think this would be easy to recruit for if there was an application process specific to front-end developers and then the dev team leads got to bid on their choices. Front-end developers could also emphasize if they had an interest in working with a specific team. Students should feel more confident and experienced in front-end development in XHTML, CSS, etc.
An alternate that I heard a few developers request was for the front-end to already be completed prior to the contest. I understand that this wasn’t the intent of the contest because we wanted to allow freedom for the teams to decide one of many paths to go, but I think the developers might prefer this.

Design/research consultants or team members. We had discussed this prior to the competition. Again, it would help the dev teams do what they do best: backend.

Questions for the developers:
What kind of challenge are you looking for?
Is being able to have freedom to choose between suggested features to include something you care about?

Honestly, I understand that it isn’t possible to complete an application in 6 hours, but I would find the competition more appealing if it was possible to create a more finished product during the competition. Perhaps that could be accomplished by decreasing the scope or increasing the time.

As far as diversity goes, I haven’t met a local female developer that isn’t affiliated with the university. I would love to be corrected on this and for someone to point out that we have an abundance of female developers in the area. If there are, we probably need to think about what we can do to increase their participation in all of our community technology events such as Geek Dinners and Tech Lunches before we start trying to recruit them into more formal events like Dev Derby. We might want to consider how we can strengthen this community while be inclusive of minorities.
As is common for other events that are trying to increase female participation, offering free childcare services for the day might help.
It would be easier to recruit amongst college women if the deadlines for applying were announced a little farther in advance of the communication pieces going out for recruitment.

I hope that’s enough thoughts to start a conversation.