Most Coding Dojos follow 2 main formats: Kata and Randori. Both formats try to give as much information as possible to the audience by evolving solutions from scratch. This is great when dealing from Novice to Competent level but tends to get slightly less interesting to people at a higher level. The Kake format goes beyond competent by adding an extra challenge. It increases dynamics by putting people into a more “real” world exercise. Participants deal with unknown code bases and have to evolve from them. This clinic will present the format and initiate a real session with the attendees.

The art of Test Driven Development (TDD) is a skill that needs to be learnt, and takes practice to master. In this workshop, a select number of conference participants, with considerable skill and experience, will perform code katas. The aim is for them to demonstrate excellence. The code Kata problems are not supposed to be hard in themselves, the challenge is to solve them in a pair using TDD, and end up with great code. This session is for the benefit of agile developers, who can come along and witness TDD and pairing, get a chance to ask questions, and provide feedback.

The idea of the coding dojo was introduced at XP2005, and since then has grown in popularity. These days there are many dojos meeting regularly throughout the world. I’d like to share some of my experiences running dojos for various groups of developers in settings such as at a company internal developer get together. as a led training course, and at a grass roots community user group. I’ll be talking about what I’ve learnt and taught about programming, and programmers. I hope to inspire more people to go home and start their own dojos.