For the last five or six years, I’ve been using coding exercises during job interviews. After talking a little with a candidate I open my laptop, call up an editor, and we sit together to do some coding.
My favourite exercise for this is a refactoring kata that I came up with. I’ve always found it more interesting how people deal with bad code they encounter than any small amount of code that can be written in this kind of short period.
The form of the kata is very much inspired by the ‘Gilded Rose’ kata, but it’s intentionally smaller so that it’s possible to get to a point where tests can be written and the code refactored in a period of about an hour, hour and a half.
The code is supposed to be the code of a automatic transmission. Someone has built it, but it was probably (hopefully!) never released. You are asked to make a few improvements so that the gear box can be made more energy efficient in the future. This is the description:
Top Gear Refactoring Kata
The code that we need to work in looks like this:
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/*
* CodingAssignments Refactoring: GearBox
*
* This is a refactoring challenge where the candidate can look at a single-method
* case, where the method is untested, needs refactoring, and is hard to read. Oh,
* and contains bugs;-)
*
* The assignment is as follows:
*
* This is the code for our customer's new environmentally friendly electric car.
* The car is very dependent on software for almost everything, and the part that we're
* working on is the automatic gear box. The code you see is the automatic gear box, which
* currently shifts up if the engine goes over 2000 rpm, and down if it goes under 500.
*
* For our this new car, it's been determined that the choice of gear can be much
* more efficient if we could just set more specific ranges of rpm for each gear.
* Future versions of the car could then use actual measurements of fuel consumption
* to configure those ranges on the fly!
* Your assignment is to make the gearbox accept a range of rpms for each gear (and
* of course use that range to shift gears!)
*
*/
package com.lagerweij;
public class GearBox {
private int s = 0;
private int e = 0;
public void doit(int i) {
if (s < 0) {
// do nothing!
e = i;
} else {
if (s > 0) {
if (i > 2000)
s++;
} else if (i < 500) {
s--;
}
} if (s > 6) {
s--;
} else if (s < 1) {
s++;
}
e = i;
}
}
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I’ve made Java, PHP and ruby versions available in my github repository: https://github.com/wouterla/TopGearKata
If you add a language, let me know!