I've been a little slow getting around to writing this post, but this past Saturday, Chad Myers and myself hosted the first Austin TDD CodingDojo event. Chad has posted some good information and his thoughts on the event here. He seems a bit disappointed as to how it played out, but for me, I thought the dojo went well. If anything, it showed that TDD takes some practice and discipline. I think everyone at the event got some real value out of it. It would have been great if we would have gotten into a good ping pong pairing rhythm, but we didn't quite get there. We could have done better at crowd control, but hey, there were no loss of limbs and plus we wanted to see where it was going. We did get to cover a lot of ground on several different issues. Some of the things we discussed (sometimes at the same time) were:
- Getting started
- Doing some design up front
- Thinking too far ahead
- Organizing test classes
- Naming of test files, classes and methods
- Stub
- Mocks
- Different syntax styles of NUnit and Rhino Mocks
- Refactoring
- Tools like macros, ReSharper and TestDriven.NET
- Each other's experiences with TDD
- Good TDD books and articles
After doing introductions, having breaks, and saving time at the end for a retrospective, we talked about all those things (and more) in about 2 1/2 hours.
I felt that the event retrospective went well. Everyone gave good honest feedback which we will certainly apply to the next dojo. Click here for the event wiki page where you can find the retrospective notes. We now know how we want the dojo to work and we now have some really good ideas on how to organized it next time.
Thanks to all the folks that helped out and participated! I'm looking forward to the next one!