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Pair Programming For Four
Submitted by Jane Prusakova on Fri, 01/29/2010 - 5:09pm.
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Pair programming is hard enough with two people working at the same computer.
Now consider pair programming with four people, communicating over Skype chat and a conference call. Three of them are in the same room, one half way across the state. Everybody is working on their own computer, checking in tiny pieces of code every 20 minutes or so, and sharing code snippets through the chat.
While I would not recommend setting up a team this way, it turns out this setup can deliver very powerful results.
My team was debugging a complicated issue in an unfamiliar and less-than-intuitively-designed system, and the four people involved converged in this ad-hoc Skype-conference call programming session. We found and fixed a bunch of very different issues and learned a lot about the system. We also generated some ideas on how to avoid at least some of the issues we have found in the future.
It has been a good week. Still, it's great that it is Friday!
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Sounds like something that could be rather valuable -- something about halfway between pair programming and a really solid, low level code review!
Artie Gold -- Austin, TX
Principal Software Engineer, F4W, Inc.
Artie, thanks for your comment. However, what I was talking about was a programming/debugging session, rather than a code review.
I tend to think that code review is a discussion centered on a piece of code and its owner(s), where other people get to ask questions and challenge the code.
A debugging session is centered around a problem, rather than a piece of code. Some code still gets reviewed and changed, of course, but it's the code in many different places in the system, created at different times, and the ownership is no longer relevant.
Jane Prusakova
Senior Consultant at Improving Enterprises
Door64 blog
Yes. I understand what you're saying -- but in this case, part of the "review" process is getting it to work.
I work remotely in an environment where too few are pulled in far too many directions to ever get any code reviewed; further, getting past ownership -- and the corresponding "what if you get hit by a bus?" (which I effectively was) situation -- is also a dream. Though there's a lot of "old school" in me, code ownership is not something I tend to view as a positive.
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Artie Gold -- Austin, TX
Principal Software Engineer, F4W, Inc.
agreed, in this setup the code is getting reviewed by multiple people, instead of being owned by a single developer.
Jane Prusakova
Senior Consultant at Improving Enterprises
Door64 blog