Authored by on Thursday, Jan 17, 2013
Lunch and Learn is a new initiative at Greane Tree Technology which allows developers to gather over lunch and present topics to one another. We hope that this will not only improve the skills of our developers, but also the quality of the software we engineer. The idea stems, in a way, from a blog post about working at Stripe, which can be found at: http://blog.alexmaccaw.com/stripes-culture. The post describes a program at Stripe in which a group of employees chooses one research paper a week to read, and then gathers to discuss the paper over lunch. As of now, the presentations for Lunch and Learn revolve around books purchased for the GTT Book Club, which is an effort to acquire highly regarded software development books for employees to read.
Lead software developer Matt Gerrior kicked off the Lunch and Learn series with a presentations on Growing Object Oriented Software Guided by Tests (GOOS), written by Steve Freeman and Nat Pryce. The name should sound familiar to anyone who keeps up with the latest software development news. If it doesn't, you can learn more about the book by listening to Episode 68 of the Ruby Rogues podcast, which can be downloaded at: http://rubyrogues.com/068-rr-book-club-growing-object-oriented-software-guided-by-tests/.
The presentation focuses on the first chapter of GOOS: “What is the Point of Test-Driven Development?” Topics for the presentation include: using feedback cycles to improve software development, the different levels of testing (unit, integration, and acceptance), and how the different levels of testing can be used to build robust, well-written software that provides the required features and is easy to maintain.