Saturday, January 15, 2011

Code Retreat Poznan 2011

Today took place the next Code Retreat event, this time in Poznan (POLAND).
The workshop on which programmers working in pairs try to solve a simple problem (Conway's Game of Life ) and practice Test Driven Development and Behavior Driven Development methodologies.
After each session lasting for about 45 min. the pairs mix. Finally it took us 5 sessions.
The event started at 8.30 am with a short welcome and introduction. Then a breakfast and hard work afterwards until about 12.00 to stop for a nice lunch.
After lunch more sessions with a 30min discussion in the meanwhile.
We could choose 2 topics to discuss among the ones most interesting for us. Finally these were: "TDD vs. BDD" and "TDD in practice".
All finished at about 5.00 pm.

Personally I have a very good impression about the event. This was the first time I took part in such kind of workshop. It was interesting to see how many different approaches to the same problem we could come into in different pairs. In some cases we started writing tests for a single cell among the neighboring cells. The other time we started from bigger perspective - testing the whole board of cells.
I also find the office of Cognifide (where the event was held) very pleasant.
Summing up, I recommend similar workshop to anyone. It was worth to get up at 5.30 am to drive to Poznan from Lodz for the whole day and to come back home in the evening after 2.5 in a car.