I ran through a seminar with 7 of my developers today covering JUnit and TDD. Overall I think it went pretty well. I overestimated the material and labs we could get through, and I ended up dumping two labs out of five. Still they got a real hands on experience and I still managed to run through Bob Martin’s Bowling Game Kata.
I snuck in a good bit of pair programming. We had to run the class on our own laptops with only a few to go around, thus all but one of the developers were paired up. As usual I overheard some good conversations debating the best approaches. The one solo developer shot through the labs faster than any of the pairs, but I’m just going to chalk that up to his skill level.
I think by the end of the Bowling Game Kata that a lot of them really got it. Over the next few months we’ll see how well this strategy worked. Next I get to spread the wealth to the rest of our java developers, and lucky for them I’ve worked out some of the kinks in the class with my first group.
The number one request for a follow-up class focused on approaches for testing databases and GUIs.