---
title: "Move-Around kata for team leaders"
url: "https://www.5whys.com/articles/move-around-kata-for-team-leaders.md"
canonical: "https://www.5whys.com/articles/move-around-kata-for-team-leaders.html"
published: "2010-02-14T13:35:42+00:00"
updated: "2014-05-22T22:42:25.737000+00:00"
tags: ["Learning Phase", "Shu"]
author: "Roy Osherove"
description: "A daily kata for software team leaders in which you walk around, see each teammate's current work and challenge them to find a better solution."
usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page)."
license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
---

# Move-Around kata for team leaders

Here’s an experiment for software team leaders: a set of katas (things you repeat exactly the same way many times).

Let’s try to do the following kata once a day:

### Move-Around

1. Get out of your chair and lock your computer
2. For each team mate that sits in your floor:
    1. Ask _“can you show me what you are you working on?”_
    2. See at least one technical document they wrote (source code, documentation, build script..)
    3. If you think they could have done a better job, challenge them to find a better way to do the job without giving them the whole answer
    4. This should take no more than 5-10 minutes per team mate but you can take longer if you like.

What other katas do you recommend?

## Read next

- [4 ways to discover a stuck team member, and what you can do about it](https://www.5whys.com/articles/4-ways-to-discover-a-stuck-team-member-and-what-you-can-do-a.html): Roy Osherove recalls being fired as a stuck developer and shows how standups, code reviews, test reviews and pairing help a lead spot and unblock people.
- [The Bus Factor - Why your ‘best’ developer is your biggest problem](https://www.5whys.com/articles/the-bus-factor-why-your-best-developer-is-your-biggest-probl.html): How to spot a bus factor of one in your team and reduce it with standups, pairing, code reviews and knowledge sharing, including the team leader as one.
- [Document Your Air, Food, and Water](https://www.5whys.com/articles/document-your-air-food-and-water.html): Travis Illig on documenting a team's air, food and water: a lightweight team FAQ on source control, builds and tools that helps new members get going.


---

## About the author

**Roy Osherove**: Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery.

### Sites

- [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership.
- [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts.
- [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin.
- [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model.
- [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps.
- [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes).

### Social

- X: https://x.com/royosherove
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/osherove/

### Contact

- Contact form: https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7

### License

Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/