TDD Katas and/or Pair Programming remotely : Follow Up

[Chris F Carroll]

Firstly thank you for those who responded in December when I asked about experiences with TDD Katas remotely! I was grateful for that and I apologise for not saying so earlier.

Here’s how it went.

The team is Visual Studio/ C# / Windows only. We used MS Teams for chat and screen share, which was okay. We quickly moved to having 1 driver typing and screen-sharing, whilst the other 2-4 of us ’navigated’ or perhaps backseat drove.

The driver did one complete cycle of test-code-refactor-checkin, and then the next driver would git pull and do the next cycle.

For multiple backseat drivers instead of pairs, screen-sharing has the advantage that everyone gets a clear full view of the screen whilst the driver can still drive.

Having to work on this one check-in per cycle was a win, imho. It lead us to small meaningful commits and a natural work-cycle and breaks.

The negative is that remote does. feel. so. slow. I wish internet audio latency could be improved. Maybe audio latency is all I need to be faster?

I did make sure that repo, project, all boilerplate and even the first test were ready in advance.

On choice of Katas, I was happy with FizzBuzz for the very first “we've never done TDD or pairing before” session. Harder ones after that, like Bowling and I did a Christmas-themed one. I think it was worth keeping the theme fun. May do animal noises next. I also want to doing something with dependencies.

In coming weeks, I plan to try introducing some of the sharing/pairing tools some of you mentioned.

Again, thank you!