Take Part in TDD February 2025

The future belongs to those who prepare for it today.

Hello February! Kicking off today with a fun preparation for the weekend. The announcement of the schedule and agenda will follow on Monday. My content here, on LinkedIn and on OTJ will be devoted to Test-driven Development and TDD-related topics for the entire month.

To make it fun, here’s something you can do on your own.

The Most Comprehensive Kata for learning TDD^{that I know of}

This is the Kata I use most of the time on 1-on-1 sessions with TDD students and team workshops. It’s called the Transport Tycoon DDD/ES Kata by Trustbit (formerly Softwarepark). Season 1: Tasks one and two are what you are looking for.

Here is the github repo with the kata instructions 🔗

For Leaders

Write down testable acceptance criteria for Task #1 in a manner that allows someone less experienced than you to use your acceptance criteria as proof and sign of progress.

• Write the list of acceptance criteria for the algorithm in task 1 to be used as larger outside in tests

• Add a list of test cases for the finished solution run through to give you confidence it works

• What hints would you give your engineers on what lower-level tests to write for incremental progress

• Sort all tests in order of progress (ie. how you’d ideally wish it to be released if it had to be sliced into smaller pieces).

For Engineers

• Solve task 1. TDD, Event-sourcing or without. Doesn’t matter. You can skip the tests too. Solve the problem once without tests. Give yourself a time limit (45mins is good, 2 hours is generous).

• Take a break of at least an hour afterwards. Commit your results in a private or public repo (your choice)

• Solve it again, this time starting with TDD.

• Write a list of tests, then incrementally implement them.

• Commit each test once it’s passing so we have a nice log.

• Share your experience and questions (and/or work if comfortable)

For Try-hards

• Solve the ‘For Leaders’ section

• Implement Task 1 following your “Leader instructions” in a language you do not use primarily using TDD

• Give yourself a time limit and share what you get done.

• If you gave up or stopped unfinished, go ahead and solve it in your preferred language. Share your findings—what’s different?

• Bonus: If you did manage to solve everything quickly using TDD, congrats! You’ve built a working prototype very quickly. Now on to Task 2!

💭 Share your results with others, comment on this post.