Posts Tagged ‘dojo’

Code Kata Reporting Tool

// August 3rd, 2012 // No Comments » // Agile, Tools

Code Katas are so useful we wanted to analyze, share, and relive the infamous experience. Code katas are a core training practice for software development that I believe heavily in.  To read more about what they are and a list of good ones to practice see my Dojo Code Katas post. Here I want to discuss a script I have been working on to relive the kata step by step.

How We Got Here

We have been doing monthly Randoris at work and we have been including committing to mercurial as part of our practice.  Every refactor and every test/passing code pair we commit.  This helps us practice committing often, a key rule to distributed version control, and writing better commit messages.  This also allows us to relive the commits of each step/person as we rotate through the group. But there was no way to take those commits/diffs and output a useful report to quickly relive it.

What We Wanted

We wanted to be able to post the output back to our confluence wiki for a few reason.  We wanted to be able to analyze where we went right and where we went wrong.  We wanted others who couldn’t participate to be able to relive it as if they were there.  We wanted different teams to be able to see how the same problem is solved by each other and note the subtle differences everyone has and some tricks that certain teams do vs others. Who knows of all the great possibilities, but an open source code kata repo wasn’t good enough. It had to be fast to view, easy to get to, and easy to analyze.
(more…)

Dojo Code Katas

// April 8th, 2012 // No Comments » // Agile

Code Katas are a professional training practice developers use to stay in shape when it comes to programming, problem solving, tool utilization and much much more.  A great definition and background can be found at codekata.pragprog.com.  That link has a good list of Code Katas but has not been updated in a long time.  It can be very difficult to find documentation, Katas to try, good practices, and information on Katas cousins, Rasa and Randori.  I want to help keep up and coming developers up to date with the latest knowledge I have gathered as well as give us a place to collaborate on best practices.  These are by far my innovations, these are smart practices from the greatest minds like Robert Martin and Dave Thomas, however they are too busy to be keeping up latest documentation on the open web, so I hope to help keep these practices up to date.

List of Code Katas

Here is a compiled list of different Katas for you to choose from.  Most are links to other sites, but I may repost some on my site as many sites that have these Katas are unreliable.

Bob Martin’s Word Wrap Kata Walkthrough – Bob Martin walks you through every step of the word wrap Kata, and displays how a simple choice of the what to test next can make a problem very difficult or trivial.  This should be read and practiced by every developer learning the Code Kata and Test Driven Development.
(more…)