I attended the first Coding Dojo in Finland yesterday at the office. This is my fable attempt to report how it went (the short version: I think it turned out great).

We basically had a full house, which was nice. Some didn't show up, but we got extra audience to fill up the seats anyway. If I remember correctly, most of those present said they're not actively using TDD at work but obviously all were interested in it. And, as someone pointed out, what better way to try it out than with a bunch of other people and a projector!

Before going further, please note that these are just my personal opinions and observations and do not necessarily represent the opinion of the group.

First, the pace. The frequency of switching pairs could've been higher. We spent about 150 minutes coding with approximately 15 people and we only got once around the room, which (on average) makes for an awfully long 10 minutes per seat. I'd personally prefer timeboxing it somehow. After the session, we even joked about writing an Eclipse plugin that would force you to switch after a configured timeout, reverting all changes back to the last "green"... That ought to push for smaller tests and simpler implementations ;)

Markus had picked tennis scoring as the programming challenge. It worked pretty well, I think. The rules were simple enough that everyone understood them (and tennis isn't that rare a sport anyway) and yet complex enough to last for an entire session.

I do believe that the actual challenge isn't all that important anyway, however. The one thing that I value most about a dojo session like we had is the ensuing discussion, seeing and hearing people react to what they see on the projector. Being able to read body language is pretty essential in the kind of situations I tend to spend a lot of time in these days, and it's always a magnitude harder to "read" someone new.

Speaking of reactions, I made a lot of small observations on how different people acted while on the keyboard. Nothing surprising there, though. What was a bit surprising, however, was how the audience often stepped in to suggest solutions and comment on the driving pair's doings. Personally, I don't think that big a volume of commentary from the audience is a good thing. It wasn't a catastrophe in that sense, no, but I think it would've given many participants more "insight" into how others think and program, if they had simply held their comment for a bit longer.

And, yes, I did contribute to that excess commentary at times.

I'm really positive about the session and I hope it will become a regular thing (maybe not every week, though). It'll be interesting to see how it turns out and whether we'll be having regular dojos in Helsinki. The next session is already on Monday--do register if you're into having fun with other geeks!