SHDNUG will be holding its first TDD and SOLID Coding Dojo on Saturday April 24th at the Freeman Branch library (16616 Diana Lane Houston, TX 77062 - (281) 488-1906) from 10:00 am - 2:00 pm in the large meeting room on the first floor.

I really want this dojo to be focused on refactoring and we’ll be discussing the SOLID Principles as we go. Many times we get the tests passing and then move on to the next thing, but that’s really defeating the purpose of TDD. We want to stop and look at what we wrote and refactor it towards greatness. This process will be slow at first, and that’s the point of a dojo. We have no deadline for delivery and I want everyone involved to ask questions, write some code, have fun, and walk out feeling like it was worth your time.

Once a test is passing we will stop and ask the following questions:

• Is it DRY?
• Does it have one responsibility?
• Does everything in it change at the same rate?
• Does it depend on things that change less often than it does?

These questions will help us apply the SOLID principles when we start to refactor and it is a nice list to keep us honest about the quality of our code. We’ll also discuss what these questions mean briefly before we really get going.

Here are the tools we will be using:

• NUnit - Good old NUnit…
• Moq - The Mocking framework with attitude…
• WatiN - I will click no more…
• NBehave - Oh…Behave (or SpecFlow, I can’t make up my mind)
• ASP.Net MVC 2 - This time we mean it…
• .Net 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010 - No weekend would be complete without a little VS in your grill…
• EF or NHibernate (if we have the time) - ORM you glad I didn’t say LINQ-To-SQL, or worse DataSets…

We will go through the process used on real Agile projects using BDD, and working from the outside-in. We start with a feature and feature level test (using NBehave and WatiN), and then start to work our way down to Unit Tests for different components, finishing with a passing feature. I hope we can do all this tomorrow and look forward to seeing everyone there.

We are still looking for sponsors for this meeting, but sponsor or no, there will be food and drinks for all. I’m really looking forward to this dojo and know that it will be a lot of fun.

See you there,
Aaron