Comics offer truths in recognisable situations.
I like gather stories from talking to developers, to use in teaching. This isn’t always possible though. Luckily, other approaches also work via social media, such as LinkedIn and BlueSky.
Another option are comics from one of the regular contributors to the genre, who offer different insights. These can be useful to illustrate specific points in a memorable image.
Comics add to the message
Comic add an image, which helps some people understand the issue more, than if you only talk about it.
The irregular posting of images at MonkeyUser are good. For example, they cover technical dept, dependencies, and other issues. Sadly, while newer ones are tagged, you need to search for other ones via topics. They focus mainly on programming issues. The comics are copyrighted to MonkeyUser, so displaying them on a slide, so you’re free to link to them, and display them in a lecture on the page.
Comic Agile cover lots of topics in a few panels, plus add a blurb on the topic too, such as this one on technical debt. These are useful and cover a wide-range of agile topics from product development, and team issues too. As their comics are licensed under Creative Commons, you’re also free to reproduce them, but not to sell them.
XKCD is possibly the oldest of these. It covers so many good topics, which can be used in many situations. The one on dependencies turns up regularly. They are also Creative Commons, so you’re free to use them, but not sell them.
The only issue with them are that the ‘extra joke’ in the ‘alt tag’ isn’t always visible because you can’t always hover a cursor over the image. The dependency one is: “Someday ImageMagick will finally break for good and we’ll have a long period of scrambling as we try to reassemble civilization from the rubble.”
The XKCD for compiling is also wonderful as you can see. The alt-text is “‘Are you stealing those LCDs?’ ‘Yeah, but I’m doing it while my code compiles.’
My favourite one is probably the 10,000 one, which covers coke and mentos. The alt-text adds this: ‘Saying ‘what kind of an idiot doesn’t know about the Yellowstone supervolcano’ is so much more boring than telling someone about the Yellowstone supervolcano for the first time.’ It’s the humility and fun that appeals to me.
UPDATE
I remembered a few others that are also useful.
Work Chronicles covers all things office: teams, meetings, productivity.
Design Thinking covers design issues, and their challenges with other parts of the organisation.
Find comics that you can use with your teams
Go rummage through these links if you’ve not seem them before. If you have, then reacquaint yourself. Find your favourites, and share them with others. Find out which ones they like too.
This post is part of a project pulling together my materials and ideas about Teaching Team Collaboration: the Human-Side of Software Development for software development to students.
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The ideas above are from my book 101+ Ideas to Improve Team Collaboration, which covers all of these little things that students can do to improve their collaboration. Also available via Kindle.