This workshop is something of a reaction to a work experience that I had a year ago. Too many unit-tests were being submitted that I felt were a bit 'aimless'. I spent a while thinking about how to get across the essence of a purposeful unit test - and somewhat belatedly, this workshop (and possibly others) has emerged.
I hope to share two things in this workshop. The first is the basic idea of using unit-tests to driving development as opposed to testing an application. These TDD tests are tightly focussed and come with a sense of hard purpose. They are the antidote to aimless unit tests.
The second aspect of TDD I would like attendees to pick up is the TDD workcycle. The significance of this to me is that we get a vocabulary for the moment-by-moment activities of development. Giving the different things we do names is a necessary first step for reflection on our practice and self-improvement. If recognise that you are in a spike it's much easier to take control of what happens with the output. If you know you have to leap, then you're going to realise you need reinforcements.
You can see all the slides for the Getting into Test-Driven Development workshop again here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1en2ctq-bQpdGymTnHuje_gALk2eae0T4GHTXJBz7Ppw/edit?usp=sharing.
There are a variety of problems to work on. These are presented in Python3 as that's seems to be the common tongue for CodeHub. They have been picked to be easy-to-state and to have something interesting in their back-story.
The idea of the problems is that they are just difficult enough that they need at least several scenarios to drive the development. Until I run the workshop I won't know whether they are too hard for the time available or not. However you will need to be comfortable programming with Python3 and have some kind of unit-testing environment available.
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Scramble with bonus problem Unscramble
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Resistances with bonus problem ResistanceIsUseless
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Nucleotide Stats with hard bonus problem Max-Repeats
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Macros which comes with bonus subproblem!