Saturday, February 22, 2014

Birthday greetings refactoring kata at Barcelona Software Craftsmanship: step by step commits and screencasts


We practiced refactoring and learned about ports and adapters using Matteo Vaccari's Birthday Greetings kata in refactoring mode. This is the initial code in Java that we tried to refactor.

I prepared several slides to introduce what we were going to do. I thought that we could just start refactoring for two hours right after this explanation, but, thanks to the suggestions of some attendees, we changed the plan and did two iterations (extracting the employees repository in the first one and extracting the greetings sender in the second one) with a retrospective in the middle.

This was a really good idea because it gave us the opportunity to debate about different approaches to this refactoring and about ports and adapters. Some very interesting points were raised during those conversations and we could exchange personal experiences and views about this architecture and refactoring. This kind of conversations are a very important part of practicing together and they enrich the kata experience.

I think I have a lot to improve as an event host. Next time I'll make explicit that attendees need to bring their laptop and I'll try to help more the beginners.

I had published a possible solution to the kata, but it was just the final solution not the intermediate steps. Some attendees said that they would like to see how this refactoring could be done in small steps. For that reason, I redid the kata again at home committing after every refactoring step and recording the process:
Take this recordings with a grain of salt because I'm still working hard to improve my refactoring skills.

Well I hope this might be useful to someone.

Just to finish, I'd like to thank all the attendees for coming, I had a great time. I'll try to do it better the next time.

I'd also like to thank netmind for their support to our community giving us a place and the means to hold Barcelona Software Craftsmanship events. Having a regular place for our events makes everything much easier.

So far the events have had much more attendees than we had expected. In fact, this last Monday we nearly run out of space. If this trend continues, we'll probably need to ask for a bigger room to hold future events.

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PS: Christian Soronellas shared a version of the initial code in PHP.
Thank you very much Christian!

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