My experience at ABAP CodeRetreat – May, 2017 in Vienna

On Saturday May 20th 2017, another ABAP CodeRetreat took place. This time in the heart of Vienna, Austria.

This event was organized by Cadaxo and of course we also welcomed ABAP CodeRetreat founders Christian Drumm & Damir Majer. In this blog post I am going to write my experience from this event and how it looked like from the participant point of view.

From Developers to Developers

You should know this before you come in… this event is not another marketing presentation, but it is intensive and practice event from devs to devs. At the beginning Christian Drumm & Damir Majer gave us a motivational talk about Test Driven Development, Johann Fößleitner & Domi Bigl from Cadaxo talked about Clean Code and Refactoring with a live coding demo (refactoring ABAP method in 10 minutes).

Pair Programming & Test Driven Development in all its forms

After the talks, which took about 1 hour, our part came in. Organizers introduced us Conway’s Game of Life rules, gave us dev. system access and we (the participants) were supposed to implement the Game and of course – how the TDD says – to start with the tests first. Everything with ABAP in Eclipse.

This first coding session took about 45 minutes. Unfortunately nobody was able to implement the full solution in such a short time, but it was not the main goal of the session.

After that a smart move from organizers came in….

“OK guys, now please delete your code and start again”

Wait, what? Yes! After our 45 minutes long session was done, we took a sip of coffee and were told by the organizers to delete our code and start over again with a different partner.

This sounded like a crazy idea at the beginning but it turned out to be very cool experience how to meet another event participant and learn from his/her experience from the first session!

The whole day (8 hours) was divided into ca 1-hour-long coding sessions with a different partner and every session the rules were slightly different…. I don’t want to tell you everything in the details, to spoil the surprise, but we tried TDD and pair programming in many different forms.
From the very beginning to the end I had the feeling I am part of the event like a developer and not only a listener. So big thanks also to the other participants – without you, it wouldn’t be like that.

More information about the event can be found here & here.

One more special thanks to Cadaxo, Johann Fößleitner, Domi Bigl for organization and talks, Christian Drumm & Damir Majer for sharing the knowledge and last but not least Elisabeth Wahrstötter & Ana Lekic for helping in the backstage 🙂

If I motivated someone to join this event in the future, let me know!

Dusan