Today we ran the fifth Coder’s Dojo. Still the same Bowling Kata in Java and Eclipse (oh, I love that IDE!). This time we where only four, which allowed each of us a lot more driving time, which was fun.
This time we managed to get through the whole Kata, and even found some time to discuss one of the issues bothering some of the participants already from the start, namely error checking. Andreas and I went down that path while on the flight from the Agile Business Conference 2006 and had some learning to share. The main point being that error checking, like checking for score() being called before the game is finished (remember, the user stories actually calls for the game being finished) has to be made explicit, obviously driven by a user story (the user in this case being what ever actor is interested in such a message).
But, the most interesting thing was that we where very explicit about doing a refactoring to get a design which is better suited to fit new functionality into. I think we actually made a few steps better than Uncle Bob’s original. That feels nice 😉