The “Softwerkskammer” regional group of Düsseldorf, Germany organised its first Code Retreat this weekend (1. Sept. 2012), which I attended. The facilitator, Patrick Cornelißen (of orchit), has posted a summary of the Code Retreat, so I won’t repeat him, except for stating that the task was “Conway’s Game of Life” and we wrote code in 6 time slots (45 minutes each) each one followed by a 15 minute retrospective. Here are my observations and notes:
About the programming and pairing
First of all I found it super exciting to get pairing with programmers. Although not every one else was a programmer, I was the only tester attending and I found pairing up with programmers very exciting (Would my coding skills be sufficient?), productive and fascinating.
One pairing partner made me write the tests in much smaller steps, than I would have ever done. After struggling with the approach of implementing the desired functionality in the test (without defining any method or class), I finally realised just how small steps are possible. Those were really tiny steps. It occurred to me rather late in the slot, that what we created was a rather functional way to solve the problem. In a later slot I asked Sergey Shishkin to pair program using Clojure.
One (kind of) surprising constraint we were offered, was to avoid if-then-else and case constructs by using polymorphic dispatch. Apparently this approach was a challenge for nearly every one, see Partick’s tweet about it:
Verwunderte Gesichter bei der Vorstellung des “No-If” Constraints 🙂
#coderetreat
General remarks, tips and an observation
- When pair programming using a notebook, especially a relatively small notebook, I recommend using an external keyboard. If you’re limited to the internal keyboard either the ‘driver’ can’t easily type on the keyboard or the ‘co-pilot’ can’t easily watch what’s happening on the screen.
- If you want to learn more about your favourite programming language, editor and/or IDE, attend a Code Retreat.
- Pairing for the first time and/or pairing with people you didn’t meet before will give you new ways of thinking and programming.
- I was the only tester and the only one who used fork and knife at lunch time when eating pizza. 🙂 However, I used my hands like everyone else in my second serving. 😉
I very much enjoyed the day. Thank you to everyone involved!
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