Details
Date: Monday 28th March
Time: 7:00pm start to a 9:00pm (although doors open at 6:30pm and close when the beer’s gone)
Location: http://www.pieandale.com
Theme: TDD Exercise and Designing A University Course on Agile
Test Driven Development Exercise
Following feedback in the last meeting’s retrospective it was noticed that TDD is a central part of adopting a set of agile practices. Continuous integration, refactoring and high standards of code quality are all achieved more effectively with a suite of unit tests, and code that has been written test first. While some of these practices can be adopted without TDD it is a useful tool for anyone attempting to try a more agile approach to software development.
We’ll be undertaking a short exercise where we test drive a String Templater class based on a similar exercise performed as a prepared kata by Software Craftsmanship Journeyman, Corey Haines. Participants will need a laptop and the ability to write and compile/interpret/run code. This exercise will be language agnostic so you can choose the language you use every day, something you’re experimenting with or something completely new – the only thing you will need is a unit testing framework. A good list of xUnit based TDD frameworks can be found on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unit_testing_frameworks
I use NUnit for C# which is very similar to JUnit for Java. PHPUnit is another similar framework but SimpleTest for PHP is also adequate. Ruby and Python are popular options but for ease of use you could use JSUnit or QUnit for JavaScript and just use a browser to run your tests. There are even TDD frameworks for database languages, functional languages and XSL.
We’re planning to take TDD from the beginning so please come along if you would like to learn some basic TDD. Also if you have experience and would like to help others to learn then come along too.
Designing A University Course on Agile
Trevor Adams, long time group member and university lecturer at Staffordshire University, will be preparing a discussion to focus on items that people working in software development think that universities could teach while also providing ideas for how this could be achieved. Hopefully this will explore the topic that has been a talking point at most meetings so far as the guys from the university are keen to get relevant agile content into their modules while local companies want graduates with agile experience. If you have ideas, experience or opinions then please drop in.
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