I’m in the usual crunch mode before doing a presentation or in this case a class on Monday for six of my developers. I’m not sure how much material I really have and whether it’s possibly too much or not quite enough for a whole day.
The class is on unit testing and I’ll have some of the developers pairing up on laptops because our corporate technical training lab is booked for some HR thing for the next few weeks. I’m covering JUnit and plenty of examples including Bob Martin’s semi-famous Bowling Game Kata. It’ll be a mix of presentation, labs, and problems we work though as a group. I’m not the world’s greatest instructor, but I’m hoping my enthusiasm and pointing out all the benefits of TDD will help. I plan on leaving a few logical bugs in the code for the labs just to trip them up and force them to think about how the unit tests help them track down annoying little bugs in the code quickly. And I’m going to hit them over the head running tests every few minutes until hopefully it dawns on them that the intense feedback is a very nice side effect.
Anyway I’ll blog about how the class went when I get through it. It’s really a beta with some of my best developers before I roll it out to the larger development organization. If a few of them really get the TDD bug then I think I’m much more likely to get unit testing really adopted at our shop. “Keep the bar green to keep the code clean.”