Today I got a chance to do an athletic restart on our Boris Bikes behaviour-driven design challenge, that’s when you start right from the beginning again, discarding all your code and tests from the previous day and see how much better you can do or further you can go. The intention was to switch pairs to get more experience in pair-programming with new partners but we were an odd number of students at the Academy so I formed a triplet with two others and it went much better than expected!

(A typical breakout session to discuss issues raised during stand up)

Well, I didn’t expect the actual programming part to go badly, the members of my cohort have all proven themselves to be highly driven and talented individuals and have all been a joy to interact with. My surprise came at how much we were actually able to remember. We took the very first test that the challenge had identified for us from the user stories and then put the tutorial aside and just winged it. A couple of hours in and we had actually managed to get more than halfway through the challenge on our own impetus, each person filling the gaps in knowledge of the other. Our process was simple: 1. Identify a need from a user story. 2. Write a test to fulfil that need. 3. Watch it fail. 4. Make the absolute smallest change in application code to get the test to pass. 5. Identify a new need from user stories and rinse and repeat. By mid afternoon we had achieved so much more than we thought we ever could by this early stage and were quite exhausted. Our energy was definitely draining and we sought some help from alumni and coaches to help us get past the final few hurdles for the day.