Michael Whelan

behaviour driven blog

TDD Katas

A kata is a form of deliberate practice, with its roots in the martial arts world. It describes a choreographed pattern of movements used to train yourself to the level of muscle memory. In the world of programming, katas are small coding exercises that a programmer completes on a daily basis. They can be a great exercise for practicing TDD in particular.

Rather than attempt a new kata each day, it's recommended that you work on the same one repeatedly until completing it is almost like muscle memory. Katas can be a great way to try out a new programning language, or a new programming technique, or a new framework. For example, if you wanted to move from Moq to NSubstitute (which I recommend) you could replace Moq with NSubstitute when doing a familiar kata.

When doing the kata, focus on the TDD process:

  1. Write a failing test
  2. Write the simplest code to pass the test
  3. Refactor to remove duplication

Good habits for effective TDD

I first came across the idea of TDD katas when I attended the Codemanship TDD Master Class, a two-day weekend course put on by Jason Gorman, in 2010. The course really opened my eyes to a new way of programming with TDD, and also the idea of software craftsmanship. I became "test infected" as they say. I would highly recommend the Codemanship courses to anyone living in London, as they still run regularly!

I was just looking back at my notes from that course today, and I think that the good habits for effective TDD that Jason recommended are worth repeating here:

  • When writing a test, write the assertion first and work backwards.
  • Always run the test to see it fail in the way that you expect it to fail before writing the application code to make the test pass.
  • Write meaningful tests that are self-explanatory. That is, the names of variables and methods should communicate your intention. I write all of my code now (test and application) thinking of the "Reader" - the person who is reading my code. Will my intention now be clearly communicated to that reader some time in the future?
  • Triangulate through concrete examples towards general solutions. Work through a sequence of tests that lead you towards a more general solution
  • Keep test code and model code separate
  • Isolate tests so that they run independently
  • Organise tests to reflect organisation of model code
  • Maintain your tests
  • Tests should test one thing
  • Don’t refactor when a test is failing

Although my practice has evolved a bit, I think I follow most of them still!

TDD Katas

I have collected a number of TDD Kata exercises over the past few years. I keep them in a repository on GitHub for easy reference. You can find them here.

  • Anagrams: Write a program to generate all potential anagrams of an input string. From a code project article by Richard Dalton.
  • Bank Transfer: Create a simple bank account program. From Codemanship.
  • Fibonacci Generator: Write some code to generate the Fibonacci sequence up to a specific length which is no shorter than 8 numbers and no longer than 50.
  • Fibonacci Sequence: Write a program that writes out the number for a given position in the Fibonacci Sequence From Codemanship.
  • Fizz Buzz: Generate a string of integers, starting at 1 and going up to 100, substituting any integer which is divisible by 3 with "Fizz", and any integer which is divisible by 5 with "Buzz", and any integer divisible by 3 and 5 with "FizzBuzz".
  • Fizz Buzz Whiz: Same as FizzBuzz but substitute prime numbers with "Whiz."
  • Pager: Write the underlying data model for a pager control. I haven't done this one yet, but I think it will be a great kata. From Tomek Kaczanowski.
  • Prime Numbers: A bit simpler than the famous Uncle Bob one. Create a method that, given an integer, returns true if it is a prime and false if it is not.
  • String Calculator: One of the better known katas. The essence is a method that, given a delimited string, returns the sum of the values. From Roy Osherove.
  • Word Counter: A method that, given a delimited string, returns a collection of all of the unique words in it and the count of how many times they occurred. Start off with a space between words, but later other delimiters wil be added.

Coding Dojos

A coding dojo is an extension of TDD katas. A coding dojo is a regular meeting where you and your team meet up to focus on improving practical coding skills, perhaps working on katas together and discussing lessons learned. Emily Bache has a great course on coding dojos for TDD on Pluralsight.

About Michael Whelan

Michael Whelan is a Technical Lead with over 20 years’ experience in building (and testing!) applications on the Microsoft stack. He is passionate about applying agile development practices, such as BDD and continuous delivery, to agile processes. These days his primary focus is ASP.Net MVC Core and Azure. He contributes to a number of open source frameworks through TestStack.

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