TDD meet the team. Team, meet TDD!

​​ I have recently been running DOJO sessions to introduce eXtreme Programming (XP) practies and like to hope they have been relatively succesful. As ever with these sort of sessions the main benefit is personal development (as blogged about here)

In a 1.5 hour slot (which at the time of writing I’d organised 3 times) I managed to introduce the following TDD related topics and let people actually practice them.

• TDD in general
• Testing all paths including exception handling
• How tests help to document the code
• Design patterns which included test patterns not using mockito
• Writing the smallest amount of test before smallest amount of code. How this creates ‘unbreakable code’
• How this leads to the ability to ‘mercilessly refactor’
• Red. Green. Refactor.

It also gave me the added benefit of introducing:

• Pair programming
• Driver/Navigator
• Ping pong programming
• Intellij Idea including shortcuts
• Mob programming v Dojos and their outcomes
• The difficulty of boundary testing but benefit of code structured this way once done
• Various design patterns including code reuse and Single Reponsibility Principle
• Pairing intensity

Finally it encouraged people to be comfortable plugging in a laptop and coding infront of a few people which can be invaluable for knowledge sharing.

Just shared this in case running the same style of session could help others, or incase you have any advice

Hope this helps