I came across a blog post by Rachel Davies where she wonders whether the Shu-Ha-Ri approach to learning/teaching is actually harmful and I found Rachel’s thoughts around the teaching of principles and practices quite interesting.

What I find interesting about this is that when I first started learning about agile I would read the principles and they would all make sense but I didn’t know what to do with that knowledge.

It was only after I’d used the practices frequently and in most cases taking the practices too far that I reached the stage where I could start asking questions that actually had any relevance.

For example Test Driven Development is one practice that I learnt and one of the principles which encourages this approach to coding is the need to get quick feedback on our work.

It would be quite easy to question whether we should test drive everything and you could quite correctly have the opinion that we shouldn’t use this approach for absolutely everything.

However, without spending some time following this practice that opinion wouldn’t be particularly useful because you would lack the experience that tells you which type of code we should or should not look to test first.

Having decided that TDD was the only approach to writing code I eventually got into situations where it didn’t seem to make sense to stick so rigidly to this practice and it was only then that the value of the underlying principle became clear to me.

I don’t think I was ever forced not to ask questions but I was just so concentrated on learning how to do the practices properly that I focused on that.

I often find that it’s useful to use practices too much until you cause yourself pain.

Martin Fowler has a nice graph which shows how people adopt meta programming when coding Ruby and I think this links quite closely to my experiences when learning a new practice.

For me at least this seems to be a necessary learning step before I eventually step back and think about the principle that originally led me to following that practice. I can then start using the practice again but in a more effective or intelligent way.

What I’ve described above is often the way that I learn new things but I’m sure that others' experiences will vary so it’d be interesting to hear about other approaches too!