We held our first coding dojo this week and worked through the C# version of the Tennis Refactoring Kata.  We followed the Randori method and the agenda scripted out by Emily Bache in her book, The Coding Dojo Handbook, and it worked really well.  I can definitely recommend her book and Pluralsight course on this topic.

Our main takeaways were regarding the importance of unit testing to conducting refactoring, the power and value of renaming methods and variables with little or no risk, and we picked up some nifty keyboard short cuts from each other.

The session went so well, that we are going to continue meeting weekly working through katas that improve our refactoring skills until we feel comfortable refactoring legacy production code at will.

Many thanks go out to Glynn, Altaf, and Raj for making this first dojo gathering a success.