Coding dojo helper - Mortal Kombat Edition

A colleague of mine told us that really good developers could do a red-green-refactor-circle in about 90 seconds. This sounds quite fast, but I thought that maybe one day we could achieve that... To help getting a feeling for the time spend doing such a circle, I wrote a tool. This tool should take the time of each developer doing a round and calculate the average time of a complete timebox used for a kata, for instance.

Learned new tools :)

As a kata originally comes from martial arts, the tool got a touch of the famous video game Mortal Kombat ^^ For development, I used Blend, Gimp and Audacity to do the design and learned some new tricks. For example, one can draw an ellipse with Blend and select Object --> Path to convert it into an animation path. This path can be used in a storyboard to make a button go round another control for example:

The second thing I've learned is to capture keystrokes even if the window isn't active. This article of Stephen Toub has shown me how to do that. So, if the user presses the Scroll-Button, the stopwatch starts. If he has finished his work, he presses the Scroll-Button again and the next developer begins to code. At the end of the timebox, one presses the Pause-Button and the screen changes to show the average TDD-time and a chart listing all times:

Neat, he? This is also the first time I used a DCVS.

The first attempt was to use Git, GitHub and TortoiseGIT as mediator. But as I'm developing this on a company-laptop during my ride home, there were some difficulties accessing GitHub and I abandoned this quite fast (I do think there are ways to circumvent this, but I hadn't got the nerves to look for them any further). So I tried Mercurial, Kiln and TortoiseHg and it worked like a charm. If you want, you can fetch the sourcecode at codingdojo.kilnhg.com and have a try for yourself if you can master the red-green-refactor-mantra in under 90 seconds. On our first try, we set the alarm to a moderate 3-min-timeout, but did a 4:30 min in average *ouch*. Next time, we'll use a 4-min-timeout and are keen to beat that :)