Every thursday at 11am we meet in front of a computer and start a 1h-timeboxed session. This session consists of 3 parts: discuss kata, code, retrospective.
Discuss kata
First, we decide which kata to start with. If we haven't finished the kata from the week before, we throw away the results and start again from scratch including finding a common interpretation of the requirements (e.g. does an account number consist of 3 or 4 lines). Throwing away the work you have already done is not painful at all. Actually, it is necessary to improve yourself. Seeing direct improvements (e.g. completing a part of the kata which was never touched the week before) is priceless!
This part should be as long as necessary but as short as possible. At the moment, we need more than 10 minutes before writing our first test. I think we can cut that into halves in the coming weeks.
Code
At the moment, we work on the Bank OCR-kata and haven't finished the first user story yet. Before this kata, we successfully finished the katas Prime Factors and Roman Numerals *proud*. We do the katas (as well as our actual real-code-pair-programming) in a flow-Randori system:
The first person to be on the keyboard creates the test-project and writes the first test. After that, we play a round of musical chairs and the next developer solves the test. When it's green, he has the chance to refactor the code using baby-steps. Having finished the refactoring, all he has to do now is to write the next test and initiate the next round of musical chairs (which doesn't necessarily needs music to play in the background).
I think doing this kind of system is perfect when you're 4-6 people. Are there more than that, you would probably more likely do the prepari system. But being 10+ developers, I would rather split the group into two halves than having one big group where not everyone can participate.
Retrospective
About 5 minutes before the deadline, we begin the retrospective and try to find out what was good or what can be better next time. Right now, we're far away from a fast TDD-circle: approximately 5 minutes lasts a red-green-refactor-mantra, which surely can be lowered to 2 minutes.
The first person to be on the keyboard creates the test-project and writes the first test. After that, we play a round of musical chairs and the next developer solves the test. When it's green, he has the chance to refactor the code using baby-steps. Having finished the refactoring, all he has to do now is to write the next test and initiate the next round of musical chairs (which doesn't necessarily needs music to play in the background).
I think doing this kind of system is perfect when you're 4-6 people. Are there more than that, you would probably more likely do the prepari system. But being 10+ developers, I would rather split the group into two halves than having one big group where not everyone can participate.
Retrospective
About 5 minutes before the deadline, we begin the retrospective and try to find out what was good or what can be better next time. Right now, we're far away from a fast TDD-circle: approximately 5 minutes lasts a red-green-refactor-mantra, which surely can be lowered to 2 minutes.
In my opinion, every company writing software should have a regular coding dojo in the calendar. It helps enormously to spread a common coding style. Everyone learns from everyone, be it new keyboard-shortcuts (- is my newest) or amazing tools like R# or Visual Studio Power Tools.
With coding dojos, it is easy to integrate new team members and guide them in learning TDD. All in all, I highly recommend that!
