TDD Class Part Duex

Ran my second class on TDD with JUnit today. Now the bulk of our developers have been exposed to TDD directly, but I think there’s still a lot of work to do to nail down real adoption. One of the issues is quite a few people in the class don’t actually get to code in Java all that often so their actual skills are pretty rusty. That made it a lot harder to get through the labs.

I was pleased that two of the QA staff made it to the training and actually got some hands on with the labs. I think QA and development in our organization are starting to work a lot more closely together. Focusing developers on testing can only help.

I was also really pleased that the group helped each other out with a lot of pairing. Even with the three labs I didn’t get tons of requests for help. Of course I might have missed something and they were just content to struggle alone, but I don’t think so.

And I did learn some presentation training lessons some for the second or third time:

  • Always be fully prepared. I changed the Keynote presentation up til the Friday afternoon before so I couldn’t get the slides printed until Monday morning and I spent 2 hours doing it. If I had finished them and sent them to the internal print shop–bang an hour later, bound PDF copies.
  • When bringing snacks for the afternoon to keep people awake, don’t just get things like peanut M&Ms since some people may be allergic.
  • Always setup the machines ahead of time fully. (I was saved here by the fact that it was a pretty technical group and they helped each other out, including putting the labs on a shared drive and not a CD, duh.)

I left the group with the idea that as soon as possible they should go ahead and really try out TDD for about two weeks so they could get a much better feel for it. If most of them try that out this class will have been a wild success. In the meantime I’ll be trying to do a lot more pairing with my own developers. I’m hoping to have a few test infected converts eventually.

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