July Meeting: Back to TDD with a Lean Code Challenge

Details 

Pineapple Bike by gipukan

Date: Monday 25th July

Time: 7:15pm start to a 9:15pm (doors open at 6:30pm and close late).

Location: http://www.pieandale.com

Theme: Back to TDD (with a Lean Code Challenge)

Back To TDD

Following the session on the Software Craftsmanship 2011 conference, and then a great session with two speakers, it makes sense to get back to some programming, and use some of the examples picked up at the software craftsmanship conference.

Test Driven Development enthusiast and Agile Staffs member, Paul Williams, has volunteered to run a session from Software Craftsmanship originally created by Chris Parsons. It involves the building of a small shop checkout application for a fruit seller that has to expand quickly to meet customer demand. The increasing complexity and high pressure features that will need to be added mean that test driven, clean code should help you out – no-one says you have to test drive and refactor though, the only requirement is to produce the features in time. As this is in a TDD session, and being run at Agile Staffs, it might be a clue which approach should yield the most successful project outcome, but we just don’t know.

As ever, there will be some developers experienced in test driven development around, and there will be lots of pairing going on, so don’t worry if you are unsure about TDD,  just ask.

Requirements

You’ll need your favourite development environment and the ability to write, run and unit test code. The “acceptance tests” of each stage involve typing in the fruit purchased to compare the expected price. Your application should have the ability to accept this input from STDIN, command line or a web interface. Other than that, you can use any language you like. We’ll have limited internet connectivity so please download anything you think you may need in advance. Again, for those PHP and JS types amongst us I’ll bring the licence code for PHPStorm so if you want to download and install the latest version in advance you can just register it at the meeting.

Lightning Talks

I’ve not had any volunteers for a lightning talk yet although this doesn’t mean we won’t have any. If you have any topic you’d like to share with the group then you can have a 10 minute slot at the beginning of the meeting. Either let me know via twitter, the email group or in the bar before we start.