2007Dec12SPDojo

**Participants:** [DaniloSato](/people/DaniloSato) , CarlosVillela ,

CharlotteChang , FabricioSousa , FernandoMeyer , Guilherme, HugoCorbucci , MarianaBravo and MarioHCT

Scribe: DaniloSato

Kata: Poker Hands (acm.uva.es/p/v103/10315.html) in Ruby

Schedule

: 20:15 ~ 20:30 Choosing and Discussing the Problem

In the beggining of this session we had a few people in the room, so we decided to revisit an already solved problem (Poker Hands), but this time in Ruby. The discussion turned out to be short, since we already had a strategy for solving the problem. One interesting thing to notice is that Hugo came up with an easier way to calculate a Hand’s rank, using hexadecimal values. So, a hand with ‘2H 5S 7C 8S JC’ would have a rank of 0xB8752, which would made our tests easier to write.

20:30 ~ 22:00 Coding Session

The problem was solved in Ruby with Rspec in a RandoriKata style, but this time we decided to switch pairs without using the timer (since we had few people in the beggining). After a while, some new participants arrived, and we found that time-boxing the round is good when you have many people to program. Another interesting practice some of the pairs used during their turn was to use PingPongPairProgramming , where one developer writes a failing test and the other makes it pass, switching roles more often than usual. The code is available at groups.google.com/group/dojo_sp/files.

22:00 ~ 22:15 Retrospective

Some of the lessons learned from the session were: a lot of ruby; we were glad to have new people attending our session; the new participants enjoyed learning how to write tests first using TDD. Some of the things that could be improved: we think that time-boxing turns is a good practice when you have lots of developers; some people didn’t like to solve the same problem again (poker); and we thought that this time we had less interaction than usual.