A Workshop on TDD with Functional Programming

Test-Driven development is a technique that’s mostly being practiced within the object-oriented development community. I’ve done and taught TDD in many contexts over the last 15+ years but all of it in OO-centric codebases.

Since I’m personally very much interested in functional programming but have never done production stuff with it, I’m eager to learn how TDD can be transferred to the realm of Haskell, Clojure, F# and others or if that should be a goal at all.

Therefore, I’m planning to organize a workshop for people who want to explore:

• If TDD is still a worthwhile approach when doing functional programming.
• How the benefits of TDD - like quick feedback, regression testing and incremental design - can be achieved by alternative techniques - e.g. REPL-driven development, type inference, Yupiter iBooks and other stuff.
• If functional style programming should change the way we develop and test-drive code in more classical OO environments.

Basic Parameters:

• The workshop will be 3 days.
• It’s completely non-profit.
• Attendees pay for their own travel and accomodation.
• Common costs for room, tech and food will equally be shared; I estimate 50 to 70 € per day and person.
• All attendees will create the workshop “program” together. I’ll try to arrange some sessions beforehand so that we have something to start with.
• No restriction on programming languages or IDEs.
• There’s no required knowledge but a strong interest in FP and TDD is assumed.
• I assume a max of 20 attendees. Beyond that selection will mainly be done on a come-first, serve-first basis.

The workshop will take place in Heidelberg, Germany, or nearby. I have two alternative dates to offer:

• June 27 to 29
• July 4 to 6

If you are interested to attend send me an email with your choice(s) of dates, as well as your experiences and interests considering the workshop topic “TDD with functional programming”. Feel free to suggests workshop sessions, execrcises and topics.

The decision about actual date and participants will hopefully be taken by end of March.

Update:

The date has been fixed: June 27 to 29, 2017

Location: Holiday Inn Heidelberg City Center

Costs: Approx. 150 EUR / participant (without lunch and dinner)

Update 2:

After deciding on the location I had to limit the number of participants to a max of 10; there are no free spots left.

Update 3:

I’ve written a short summary about the workshop take-aways.