TITLE: Becoming More Agile in Class AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford DATE: May 14, 2014 4:52 PM DESC: ----- BODY: Days 2 and 3 of my Agile Software Development May term course are now in the books. This year, I decided to move as quickly as we could in the lab. Yesterday, the students did their first pair-programming session, working for a little over an hour on one of the industry standard exercises, Conway's Game of Life. Today, they did their first pair programming with unit tests, using Bill Wake's Test-First Challenge to implement the beginnings of a simple data model for spreadsheets. I always enjoy watching students write code and interacting with them while they do it. The thing that jumped out to me yesterday was just how much code some students write before they ever think about compiling it, let alone testing it. Another was how some students manage to get through a year of programming-heavy CS courses without mastering their basic tools: text editor, compiler, and language. It's hard to work confidently when your tools feel uncomfortable in your hands. There's not much I can do to help students develop greater facility with their tools than give them lots of practice, and we will do that. However, writing too much code before testing even its syntactic correctness is a matter of mindset and habit. So I opened today's session with a brief discussion, and then showed them what I meant in the form of a short bit of code I wrote yesterday while watching them. Then I turned them loose with Wake's spreadsheet tests and encouragement to help each other write simple code, compile frequently even with short snippets, and run the tests as often as their code compiles. Today, we had an odd number of students in class, something that's likely to be our standard condition this term, so paired with one of the students on a spreadsheet. He wanted to work in Haskell, and I was game. I refreshed my Haskell memories a bit and even contributed some helpful bits of code, in addition to meta-contributions on XP style. The student is relatively new to the language, so he's still developing the Haskell in his in his mind. There were times we struggled because we were thinking of the problem in a stateful way. As you surely know, that's not the best way to work in Haskell. Our solutions were not always elegant, but we did our best to get in the rhythm of writing tests, writing code, and running. As the period was coming to an end, our code had just passed a test that had been challenging us. Almost simultaneously, a student in another thrust his arms in the air as his pair's code passed a challenging test, too, much deeper in the suite. We all decided to declare victory and move on. We'll all get better with practice. Next up: refactoring, and tools to support it and automated testing. -----