In about a week, I’m off to Sardinia for XP2009, which judging by my experience of past XP conferences should include lots of really interesting discussion about eXtreme Programming and agile in general. Probably over a beer, in the sunshine beside the pool :-)

The conference tends to revolve around workshops and tutorials rather than presentations, so you get the chance to really explore and discuss issues with some of the leading thinkers in the field. This year I am responsible for organizing a workshop, and I’m hoping to get lots of programmers together and discuss Test Driven Development, and issue close to my heart.

The format I have chosen is a coding dojo. I have been running a coding dojo here in Göteborg for some time now, and as well as practicing our TDD skills with Randori, occasionally someone feels confident enough to perform a Prepared Kata. I thought that XP2009 would be an ideal occasion to see some top class Prepared Kata performances.

A little while back I put out a call for participation and happily, I got responses from several excellent coders with long experience of running and participating in coding dojos. So this is a summary of the programme (see here for the full description):

who which Kata language/tools
ThomasNilsson & Andreas KataBowling Java
DaniloSato & Francisco ? Ruby with RSpec/ possibly Cucumber
ThomasSundberg & TobiasAnderberg a new Kata, parsing text files containing blackjack games, in order to train a neural network. Java
LasseKoskela & Dave Nicolette ? probably Java with JUnit max/infinitest, possibly Ruby with ZenTest?/autotest

A bit vague in places, but still. I think we’re going to have a great afternoon enjoying some top notch coding. Everyone at the conference is welcome to come along, watch the performances and participate in the discussion. Perhaps you’ll be joining us? Do let us know in a comment on this blog.