At the XP2007 conference, Geoff and I presented a workshop entitled “The coder's dojo: Acceptance Test Driven Development in python”. (Geoff also presented the same workshop at agile2007). We had three aims with this workshop, the first was to use the meeting format of a coders dojo, the second was to do some coding in python and the third was to demonstrate how you can do Acceptance Test Driven Development using TextTest. We felt the workshop went well, we had around 30 participants and we were able to do a little of everything we had set out to do.

Perhaps the most important thing was what we learnt from the experience. The workshop participants gave us some very useful feedback. One thing people said was that there were too many new ideas presented to expect as much audience participation as we did, and that instead of trying to do a Randori style kata, we should have done it as a Prepared kata. There also seemed to be a view that the Kata we had chosen (KataTexasHoldEm) was quite a difficult one. Another very valuable piece of feedback was that we were doing Test Driven Development (TDD) with much larger steps than people were used to.

What I have done is to create a screencast in an attempt to address this feedback, and open up our workshop material to a larger audience. In it, I perform a Prepared Kata of KataMinesweeper, doing TDD with TextTest and python. Geoff and I have been developing this approach to testing for a few years now, and we think it deserves consideration by the wider agile testing community. There are important advantages and disadvantages compared to classic TDD with xUnit.

I will write an article about this approach and provide links to the screencast in my next post on this blog.