[Chicago-talk] Containable examples

[Pete Krawczyk]

What is an example of a small, easily explained and containable project?

This morning, I came in early to work to give a presentation on 
test-driven development to some people who weren't American.  The project 
we developed was a Perl module that keeps track of a game of bowling and
reports the score at the end.

This is a great, small, containable project, I thought.

The problem lies when you're crossing cultural, language and physical 
borders.  Bowling might be something almost everyone here has done, but in 
other parts of the world, they can have different rules, if they bowl at 
all.  Part of my presentation was thus spent explaining all the rules of 
American Tenpin bowling, so that we could all work off the same ruleset.
Believe it or not, bowling isn't the easiest sport to explain over a 
phone.

After we were done, I talked to a person who orignally worked with the 
team I was training.  He told me while they had bowled at one point, it 
wasn't something really familiar to them.  If I could have had a module 
based on cricket, or soccer, or something else, we might have been able to 
avoid a lot of time spent explaining backstory before getting into the 
actual examples.

This made me further think that some examples like this would be helpful 
for people looking to write tutorials at PM meetings and conferences.

Assuming the following:

    * No knowledge of program domain (e.g., non-bowlers) at start
    * All rules and back-knowledge must be quickly explainable
    * Project must do demonstrable work within a very short time
    * Project should be able to scale to complex examples

what are some examples of projects that could be used for examples?

To get started, I'll give an example of what I'm looking for:  Write a 
module which, given two poker hands, reports which is higher (a la cmp). 
All the domain knowledge you need is what a deck of cards is, the 
different types of hands, the relative rank of hands, and the rules for 
breaking ties.

Ideas for things that aren't games would be greatly appreciated, too.

-Pete K
-- 
Pete Krawczyk
     Chicago Perl Mongers
     mongers at bsod dot net