Test Driven Development. The practice of writing a failing automatic test for each piece of software functionality that is added to a system, together with a script that can run all of these tests has many beneficial effects on the process of software development. This course would give participants experience of writing tests and then coding against them using a well-known testing framework such as JUnit.

Re-factoring. As software development progresses on a project, code gets messy and changes in one place cause unexpected breakages in overs. Re-factoring accepts the reality that code gets messy over time and builds on the advantages of TDD (test-driven development) to allow principled clean up of code. Course participants will be given a chance to clean up the kind of horridly entangled bits of code they might experience and be shown the possible benefits of re-factoring for the ongoing support of the codebase.

Tutor: Mark Stringer.  Mark has previously worked as a project manager for Soda Creative.  Previous to this, Mark worked for ten years in various development and project management roles in the software industry. Mark has also worked as a researcher in Computer Science at Cambridge University and for Xerox Research Centre Europe. Web: http://www.agile-lab.co.uk/