At the recent meeting of Hamburg’s Softwerkskammer – the German Software Craftsmanship movement – we worked through a Coding Dojo on the Roman Numeral Kata. Michael Norton wrote today about one piece that worried me as well. I think Michael did a fantastic job on tackling a different approach. But he reminded me that I wanted to put up some of the thoughts from the Coding Dojo.

We had about 12 participants in the dojo. After explaining some pieces about the format and the kata, we started the dojo. As the kata started, we had one participant asking questions up to the degree that the pair in front of the keyboard stopped doing anything.

Eventually we got the team back up to continue working on the problem. The claim of the interrupter was that we didn’t yet understand the problem well enough to design the solution. Another claim was that TDD was not a design technique. Let’s take a closer look at both of these.