Announcing an Austin TDD Randori/CodingDojo Session

Ray Houston and I will be hosting/facilitating a CodingDojo-style, Randori-style TDD session in early February here in Austin, TX.

(EDIT: Shoot, I forgot to mention that this idea came from David Laribee and Scott Bellware (no linkage currently available). I’d like to thank them for their ideas and encouragement)

We have several venues we’re currently working out the details with and we’ll post more info when we’ve finalized the location.

It will likely be Saturday February 2 or Saturday February 9, 2008.

Our plan is this:

  • Half-day, compressed session (though if there’s enough interest, we may go full-day, but that remains to be seen)
  • Building a very simple application focused on accomplishing a few user stories (NOT getting bogged down in the finer points of doing WinForms or WebForms development, we may use ASP.NET MVC, but I’d like to avoid muddying the waters with too much new technology all at once and distracting from the main focus: TDD)
  • Several micro-iterations of design and coding
  • We thinking about having a few more than the recommended 15 folks (like 25-30), but limiting the coding time of people stepping up to code so that you don’t get code hogs
  • Rather than a hard-and-fast 5 minute switch time, I was thinking more of a fishbowl/hot-seat style where, if you think you can do better, you hold up a card and take over, but you can only do it once every iteration so that you don’t get code hogs

We’re still shaking out all the details and we’re open to suggestions/criticisms, etc.

Please contact Ray or me via our blogs’ contact forms or post a comment here if you’re interested and/or would like to help in some way.

About Chad Myers

Chad Myers is the Director of Development for Dovetail Software, in Austin, TX, where he leads a premiere software team building complex enterprise software products. Chad is a .NET software developer specializing in enterprise software designs and architectures. He has over 12 years of software development experience and a proven track record of Agile, test-driven project leadership using both Microsoft and open source tools. He is a community leader who speaks at the Austin .NET User's Group, the ADNUG Code Camp, and participates in various development communities and open source projects.
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  • http://netcave.org Alan Stevens

    Chad, this sounds like a great antidote to “technotainment.” Has anyone tried this within their team as an alternative to code reviews?

    ++Alan

  • http://blogs.dovetailsoftware.com/blogs/kmiller/ Kevin Miller

    This is simply goodness. It is very hard to really get TDD until you see it in action. I may have a scheduling conflict but I would love to attend.

  • http://www.lostechies.com/blogs/joe_ocampo/ Joe Ocampo

    Count me in! Do we get to wear Gui’s?

  • http://persistall.com Brian Donahue

    Hey Chad – I have been thinking about doing this with Philly ALT.NET. Your post has given me some food for thought, thanks! I’m sure you will, but please let us know how it turns out.

  • http://grabbagoft.blogspot.com Jimmy Bogard

    Yeah this should be fun!

  • http://donie.endofinternet.org/ Steve Donie

    We’ve been talking about doing this at work – if I am not on vacation I might be able to come. Would love to see someone else do this before I do. Or if we get started before then, I’ll bring some ideas.