Last weekend Jarkyn, Sam and I were lucky enough to be able to attend to SoCraTes UK 2015. We arrived there by car, just some minutes before the presentations started.

I used the time in the trip to try to finish a lightning talk “Effective Learning: An apprentice point of view” that I started writing the day before.

In the presentations, I noticed some people interested in refactoring and influencing the culture in a company that has not adopted testing yet. So, after a tour around the hotel and dinner, I proposed Georgina, who did a lightning talk on characterization tests as a way of learning a code base, to do a session on refactoring the Gilded Rose kata with those ideas. I have used that kata before in my previous company to successfully provide enough confidence to deal with their code base.

Next day, before presenting the session, Franzi proposed the same kata in mob format. So we decided to unite forces and do it together.

Some interesting conversations about generative, mutation and characterization testing developed because of that. The golden master technique also was mentioned in those. And I recommended to any person interested to a blog post from my first mentor, Sebastian Ortega, about the combination of generative testing and golden master as what, I think, is the best approach that I know to deal with that type of code.