I am always looking for new ideas to animate regular coding dojo sessions in my company One2Team.
This kata is not particularly new. The introduction given by Dave Thomas, its author, was quite appealing:
Martin Fowler gave me a hard time for Kata02, complaining that it was yet another single-function, academic exercise. Which, or course, it was. So this week let's mix things up a bit.
Here’s an exercise in three parts to do with real world data.
The original kata subject can be found here : Kata04: Data Munging - CodeKata.
My implementation can be found here : one-kata-per-day/data-munging at master · ericlemerdy/one-kata-per-day
To what extent did the design decisions you made when writing the original programs make it easier or harder to factor out common code?
Responsibilities separated in several classes makes it harder to identify common code to the point that I inlined all the design before making the abstract version.
Libraries and structures are the same in the original programs and the generic one.
Was the way you wrote the second program influenced by writing the first?
- Totally ! I literally duplicated the design with copy and paste tests and code… And so, a kitten has died. Seriously, only names, columns index and striping some chars changes.
Is factoring out as much common code as possible always a good thing? Did the readability of the programs suffer because of this requirement? How about the maintainability?
I don't think factoring as much as possible is always a good thing. Even if you have to emerge commonalities in the behavior, it should not obsess you otherwise everything is frozen and hard to move. I have not found anything else than experience to emerge the right abstraction.
In this kata, maybe 2 is not enough to commonalize. In the real world, I maybe left the 2 programs without sharing common code. In fact, it already shares good library usage !
I have identified several phases :
- read file
- compute an operation for each line (difference)
- extract the line with the lowest value
In this context, it is important to split file reading (implementation) and data extraction form actual computation (business). If your data can fit in memory, everything remains simple and clear.
Image reference: https://pixabay.com/en/kid-child-young-childhood-1465534/