Do you participate in code peer reviews or practice pair programming, or both? Have you been able to demonstrate an increase in software quality using these practices? What benefits and drawbacks have you observed in the course of practice? What hurdles to implementation did you face? In my own case, our development team pursued...
My boss hired a new dev right out of CompSci onto a project with a fair amount of technical debt. It will be my task to get this guy up to speed and making a decent contribution ASAP. Any suggestions on how best to do this? Any first hand experience on how precisely not to do it? My instincts are to do some code reviews on code written ...
We have a team of about 7 engineers, whom I supervise. We do not have a formal office where we all work. Instead, a handful are located outside of our city, while the rest of us are scattered around the Bay Area. Quite frequently, I find myself attempting to teach concepts like TDD or refactoring to some of our more junior (or not) deve...
I'm very curious, how popular in the world ( and I know that the stackoverflow community comes from different parts of the world ) is pair programming. Have you ever worked/are working/will work in a company where you've been pair programming ? What's your opinion on the matter ? ...
A friend of mine was explaining how they do ping-pong pairing with TDD at his workplace and he said that they take an "adversarial" approach. That is, when the test writing person hands the keyboard over to the implementer, the implementer tries to do the bare simplest (and sometimes wrong thing) to make the test pass. For example, if t...
Some members of the team are having problems programming together. Different gender, different culture, different age. How to deal with those problems? - Do not pair them together, or - Pair them together and let them come to a "golden middle" ...
I found out yesterday that due to demands from the powers that be, I am being pulled from my current project to help out a colleague with some work. Now, he is a great guy, and while it sucks I will have to put my little baby down, I am looking forward to working with him. We have both previously expressed an interest in pair programmi...
I'm looking for something like VNC, but with some extra features: The server should send only the part of the screen the client is looking at. It would be great if we could have 2 mice on the client's desktop. Or at least if the client could point to somthing without interrupting the server's mouse. A shared whiteboard would be great....
What do you not like (or even hate) in Agile development? I mean SCRUM, XP or any other light process. ...
I am looking for a good, free (preferred) screen sharing program that works well for pair programming and code review sessions for Windows (Vista x64, Server 2008). It should allow either person take control of the screen and be fairly responsive for text editing over decent broadband connections. Additional features like the ability to ...
At our company, we the developers tried some methodologies to be more productive. One thing we could not try was Pair Programming. The reason is, that we are a small company and have only few programmers (and more non-programmers). So it would be impossible to explain to our boss, that two programmers sit at the same computer and solve t...
In your experience, what is the most effective time interval at which to change pairs in pair programming? Is it 90 minutes, 4 hours, a full day? ...
During pair programming at our company, I'm the one who usually ends up talking the most. I usually think out loud my thought process. My partner sits in front of the computer and does the coding (typing?). I encourage others to think out loud so I won't end up tutoring my partner on what to do. I got the most experience at our company...
Reading the XP book, I have a condtradiction in my mind that I cant address and am wondering if you guys can help. XP says write stories on index cards, assign those to a developer, have her estimate how long the task would take and then use pair programming to do the coding bit. So then her and the developer she pairs with must choose...
I work in an Extreme Programming team, pair programming every day. Recently more and more often I get to do stuff that gives slow feedback, on order of 3 minutes. For example: change some thing, recompile, run and see wheather the performance is improved. I see it coroding the quality of pair programming, and I think it affects pairs mor...
If you were setting up a pair programming station what hardware, software and furniture would you include? Two assumptions; it would use Macs and be as inexpensive as possible. ...
I think in general Peer reviews are a very good part of development process, they often catch or question things which were not apparent when code was originally written and make you more self conscious so you format better, put in comments etc. However if you are pair programming you effectively have a live peer review, so is it worth...
Our company has been thinking about scrapping our interview procedures and bringing each candidate in for a 4-5 hours sit-down with some of the programmers and just do some pair programming. I like the idea in theory but I am not sure how you can really make it fair for each candidate. How would you rate them? Wouldn't their input real...
Pair programming in Agile requires us to double the salary paid to single programmer. Of course with such approach the quality of the code is far cry better, bugs are found much earlier and so forth, but is that still worth that money? Maybe we should pay the 2nd developer's salary to the few testers (the latter are usually much cheaper ...
I want to avoid the situations when my developers do not share the common knowledge (solutions for the problems they encountered, cool tips, common mistakes, shortcuts for achieving particular goal, configuration issues, partial requirements, etc.) with each others. I'm taking about the situation when such lack of communication is accide...