A couple of weeks ago, I had happened upon majcon's and jrgen.creyaufmller's announcement for the ABAP CodeRetreat Hohenlohe. Encouraged by a colleague who had attended one of Damir's events a couple of years ago - but not really knowing what I was getting into - I registered for the event. It was planned to take place at Würth IT GmbH Waldzimmern in Niederhall on June 29, 2019.
As the date approached, I started to look into options to get from Fellbach to Niederhall - ideally via public transport as I'm not too keen to drive unknown routes by car. Luckily enough, it wasn't too much of a hassle to at least get quite close to the event's location - even on a Saturday - as the nearest train station in Neuenstein is only about 12 km away. To get there from Fellbach only involved switching trains twice and a bit more than 90 minutes all told - not much longer than taking the car, but much more relaxing for me! Lukas Weidmann, one of the other participants, was kind enough to pick me up at the train station in the morning and drop me off again in the afternoon.
Route from Fellbach (near Stuttgart in southern Germany) to Neuenstein. Niederhall is a bit to the north of that on the other side of the highway.
Shortly after 9 am the CodeRetreat kicked off with some introductory remarks from our host at Würth IT in a pleasantly cool meeting room where about 25 participants had gathered by then. Most of them were with Würth IT but some were from other companies like myself. Then, Damir set the stage of what was going to happen during the day:
What I liked right away, were the rules for the day:
Pair programming - a new experience for me
Only having heard about pair programming in the openSAP course Writing testable code for ABAP, this was my first chance to actually give it a try and experience it first hand. In order to find a programming partner, Damir asked us to sort ourselves by experience with TDD with the most experienced participants positioned on one side of the room and the least experienced ones on the other side. We paired up by who we faced on the other side of the room: very experienced with least experienced making the start and then going down the lines. By coincidence, my first programming partner turned out to be Tatjana who had been sitting next to me until then.
The programming task for the day had the enticing title "Game of life", which had some rules for cells on a board in need of being converted into code: depending on how many neighbors a living cell has it either dies or lives for the next iteration and - something I called "the zombie rule" - a dead cell could come alive with exactly 2 neighbors (if I remember that particular rule correctly!).
After briefly introducing ourselves to our programming partner, we first had to decide which aspect of the game to focus on. We settled on creating the tests and rules for when a cell lives or dies and see how far we'd get with that within the 45 minutes we had available. One aspect of pair programming - and definitely something to get used to! - is to only work with one laptop and to take turns at the keyboard, switching roles every 10 minutes or so during this first round.
The "no pressure" rule came in handy as Tatjana explained what we were actually doing (or trying to do!) while moving along and we did get about a handful of testcases for the rules defined. Along the way I picked up some of the "new" ABAP features available since NW 7.40 like the COND-statement to create code like this instead of nested IFs-ELSEIFs:
As "time flies if you are having fun", the 45 minutes Damir had given us passed away quickly - but, as "nothing had to get done", it didn't much matter that we abandoned our code in the middle of somewhere. In a short round of feedback several participants shared how it went for them, which piece of the exercise they decided to tackle (some went for the grid, while others for the rules), what they learned and how the experience felt for them.
By then, it was time for lunch and we enjoyed tasty food organised by Jürgen (thanks for a good selection!) and used the break to get to know some of the other participants and their respective challenges and development settings.
Which is why we had three more pair programming sessions during the afternoon!
After lunch, we paired up for the 2nd round of programming, this time matched by how experienced - or not - we were with ABAP OO. The rules for the keyboard usage changed, with the plan being that we switch quickly back and forth, from typing the test to typing the code and then the next test. Damir also instructed us to completely erase the code we had written in the first session in order to really start from scratch. I'll admit that I ignored this instruction - remember „no pressure“! - as I wanted to keep the code for later reference. I just created a new piece of code with my 2nd partner who turned out to be Jürgen and we decided to give testing and coding the grid-layout a try but didn't really get very far as picturing what and how to do turned out to be rather tricky - at least for me. And I can only partially blame the warm summer weather for that as we weren't really affected by it in the air conditioned meeting room!
Then came the next two rounds of pair programming where we first paired up by the colors of our t-shirts from dark to light (I'm sure this must have some hidden connection to coding experience, right?) and then with a participant we hadn‘t been programming with before. Apart from that, the task was the same with starting from scratch, and still involving "Game of life". One of these two rounds was a "free for all" in which we could, if we so chose, start with a procedural program and key that in as quickly as possible, not doing any tests at all. But, after about 30 minutes of that, Damir threw us a curve ball by now instructing us to create tests for the code! Quite the challenge with just about 10 minutes left to do it! But - and this was the biggest suprise for me - it turned out that you can actually call form routines from within a unit test! Not really sure if you should use this, but it's at least an option to potentially introduce at least some unit tests into old procedural code.
And with that, it's time for my
Here are some things I learned and/or gained more insights on:
All told, the CodeRetreat was worth attending - even on a sunny Saturday at the end of June. Thanks to Jürgen and Damir for organising and Würth IT for hosting it!
Here is Damir's tweet about the event as a "parting shot":
As the date approached, I started to look into options to get from Fellbach to Niederhall - ideally via public transport as I'm not too keen to drive unknown routes by car. Luckily enough, it wasn't too much of a hassle to at least get quite close to the event's location - even on a Saturday - as the nearest train station in Neuenstein is only about 12 km away. To get there from Fellbach only involved switching trains twice and a bit more than 90 minutes all told - not much longer than taking the car, but much more relaxing for me! Lukas Weidmann, one of the other participants, was kind enough to pick me up at the train station in the morning and drop me off again in the afternoon.
Route from Fellbach (near Stuttgart in southern Germany) to Neuenstein. Niederhall is a bit to the north of that on the other side of the highway.
Getting started
Shortly after 9 am the CodeRetreat kicked off with some introductory remarks from our host at Würth IT in a pleasantly cool meeting room where about 25 participants had gathered by then. Most of them were with Würth IT but some were from other companies like myself. Then, Damir set the stage of what was going to happen during the day:
- Plan for the day (see the slides)
- Tips for Eclipse
- Demo for Test Driven Development (TDD)
- Four sessions of pair programming with TDD
- regular breaks in between
What I liked right away, were the rules for the day:
- We are here to learn
- no pressure
- prevent the usual shortcuts
- find new ways
- go slow
- leave the comfort zone
- strive for perfection
- take the time
- today you get the time
- nothing has to get done
- and my favorite: ENJOY!
Pair programming - a new experience for me
Only having heard about pair programming in the openSAP course Writing testable code for ABAP, this was my first chance to actually give it a try and experience it first hand. In order to find a programming partner, Damir asked us to sort ourselves by experience with TDD with the most experienced participants positioned on one side of the room and the least experienced ones on the other side. We paired up by who we faced on the other side of the room: very experienced with least experienced making the start and then going down the lines. By coincidence, my first programming partner turned out to be Tatjana who had been sitting next to me until then.
The programming task for the day had the enticing title "Game of life", which had some rules for cells on a board in need of being converted into code: depending on how many neighbors a living cell has it either dies or lives for the next iteration and - something I called "the zombie rule" - a dead cell could come alive with exactly 2 neighbors (if I remember that particular rule correctly!).
After briefly introducing ourselves to our programming partner, we first had to decide which aspect of the game to focus on. We settled on creating the tests and rules for when a cell lives or dies and see how far we'd get with that within the 45 minutes we had available. One aspect of pair programming - and definitely something to get used to! - is to only work with one laptop and to take turns at the keyboard, switching roles every 10 minutes or so during this first round.
The "no pressure" rule came in handy as Tatjana explained what we were actually doing (or trying to do!) while moving along and we did get about a handful of testcases for the rules defined. Along the way I picked up some of the "new" ABAP features available since NW 7.40 like the COND-statement to create code like this instead of nested IFs-ELSEIFs:
METHOD determine_cell_state.
rv_cell_state = COND #( WHEN iv_aliv_nbrs < 2 THEN abap_false
WHEN iv_aliv_nbrs = 3 AND iv_cell_current_state = abap_false THEN abap_true
WHEN iv_aliv_nbrs = 2 AND iv_cell_current_state = abap_false THEN abap_false
WHEN iv_aliv_nbrs = 2 OR iv_aliv_nbrs = 3 THEN abap_true
).
ENDMETHOD.As "time flies if you are having fun", the 45 minutes Damir had given us passed away quickly - but, as "nothing had to get done", it didn't much matter that we abandoned our code in the middle of somewhere. In a short round of feedback several participants shared how it went for them, which piece of the exercise they decided to tackle (some went for the grid, while others for the rules), what they learned and how the experience felt for them.
By then, it was time for lunch and we enjoyed tasty food organised by Jürgen (thanks for a good selection!) and used the break to get to know some of the other participants and their respective challenges and development settings.
All good things come in threes
Which is why we had three more pair programming sessions during the afternoon!
After lunch, we paired up for the 2nd round of programming, this time matched by how experienced - or not - we were with ABAP OO. The rules for the keyboard usage changed, with the plan being that we switch quickly back and forth, from typing the test to typing the code and then the next test. Damir also instructed us to completely erase the code we had written in the first session in order to really start from scratch. I'll admit that I ignored this instruction - remember „no pressure“! - as I wanted to keep the code for later reference. I just created a new piece of code with my 2nd partner who turned out to be Jürgen and we decided to give testing and coding the grid-layout a try but didn't really get very far as picturing what and how to do turned out to be rather tricky - at least for me. And I can only partially blame the warm summer weather for that as we weren't really affected by it in the air conditioned meeting room!
Then came the next two rounds of pair programming where we first paired up by the colors of our t-shirts from dark to light (I'm sure this must have some hidden connection to coding experience, right?) and then with a participant we hadn‘t been programming with before. Apart from that, the task was the same with starting from scratch, and still involving "Game of life". One of these two rounds was a "free for all" in which we could, if we so chose, start with a procedural program and key that in as quickly as possible, not doing any tests at all. But, after about 30 minutes of that, Damir threw us a curve ball by now instructing us to create tests for the code! Quite the challenge with just about 10 minutes left to do it! But - and this was the biggest suprise for me - it turned out that you can actually call form routines from within a unit test! Not really sure if you should use this, but it's at least an option to potentially introduce at least some unit tests into old procedural code.
And with that, it's time for my
Take-aways from the ABAP CodeRetreat in Niederhall
Here are some things I learned and/or gained more insights on:
- some Eclipse options I hadn't come across before
- how pair programming works
- scratching the surface of TDD, but not really sure if it's "my thing" for the kind of programs I usually write
- likewise, scratching the surface of unit testing
- getting some more insights about a few of the "new" ABAP constructs
- last but not least, the realisation that unit testing can call form routines if need be, something I'm going to try out sooner rather than later
All told, the CodeRetreat was worth attending - even on a sunny Saturday at the end of June. Thanks to Jürgen and Damir for organising and Würth IT for hosting it!
Here is Damir's tweet about the event as a "parting shot":
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