Gilded Rose Katas
Introduction Last Summer, I had the pleasure of bringing Amitai Schleier into my company for a few days, as part of his coding tour . One thing that really inspired me was his emphasis on a Learning Hour each day, and on using katas. Katas are a short set-piece practices. The word “kata” comes from the Japanese martial arts tradition (形 - literally, "form") and is used to describe a regular repetitive, choreographed practice. Wikipedia gives a good description here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kata . In software, there is a good collection of these set-pieces. Implementing FizzBuzz in a new language is a good example. So, after Amitai’s visit, I started running katas every day. It took us a while to establish them, because we don’t have set starting or finishing times. But we now do half an hour of katas every day after lunch. We have used the time to look at TDD, TCR , Haskell, and we have used several well-known katas. But the one we spe...