Challenge: How would you start this problem?

Brett Schuchert — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 00:16:00 -0500

On Thursday, we’re holding our first Coding Dojo at the recently opened OkC CoCo. This isn’t the first Coding Dojo to happen in Oklahoma City. Some time back, Dave Nicolette held a Randori with a Fishbowl at the OkC Java User’s Group, and that’s the format I’ll be using for this problem. It was a blast then and I’m hoping it’ll be the same this time around.

This first DoJo is with C#, though I hope we manage to use several languages over time. I’d like to sneak in Smalltalk as soon as we have enough of a critical mass so we don’t lose people. I also plan to slowly introduce BDD (maybe not so slowly, who knows – depends on the group).

The recent refactoring exercises (here and here), they come from this problem. We’ll be starting from scratch, so you can probably imagine that those refactoring examples are not going to come up right away (actually probably not at all given the time).

So your challenge this time is not one of refactoring but rather one of an initial value problem. Given the problem statement, how would you go about starting it? I’m assuming TDD, do you make that same assumption? If so, what’s your first test? Your first few tests? What features do you try to tackle first? What questions do you ask yourself about the problem?

I’ve used this problem several times and it’s a great problem to practice many things including:

Test Driven Development
refactoring (lower case r deliberate – can you guess why?)
Refactoring to Design Patterns
Most of the SOLID principles

Anyway, how would you go about starting this problem? Or better yet, give it a try and post your first few tests (in the order you create them).

I’ll be interested in seeing how people start and I’ll compare it to what I’ve done (hint, I use this as a class-driven thing, so I’m pretty flexible on how to start it).

p.s. As a result of studying the manual for my HP 32SII, I have a much better understanding of just how its stack works. I have a EE and CS background, so the stack implementation makes sense, but I left some of its details out of the problem.

Object Mentor Blog: Tag okccoco

Challenge: How would you start this problem?