RE: Agile coming to our shop (supposedly)

No one will question collaboration between devs, and I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to learn that pair programming as found in XP wasn't the original intention.



-----Original Message-----
From: Buck Calabro [mailto:kc2hiz@xxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Tuesday, July 24, 2018 1:01 PM
To: midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: Agile coming to our shop (supposedly)

On 7/24/2018 1:16 PM, Justin Taylor wrote:

"The pairing that XP talks about isn't about the keyboarding, it's about the ideas, the concepts, the architecture."
The idea, concepts and architecture are the goals, but chaining two devs to a single PC are the means to that end.

The Pair programming link on the Extreme Programming wiki page gives you this definition:
Pair programming is an agile software development technique in which two programmers work together at one workstation. One, the driver, writes code while the other, the observer or navigator,[1] reviews each line of code as it is typed in. The two programmers switch roles frequently.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pair_programming

The context of my answer:

On 7/20/2018 5:17 PM:

Try pair programming for a few days and you will definitely flee for the hills.

I said Alt-F4, not Shift-F4. Let me be the left hand for a while and you be the right so I can work on my dexterity.

I totally understand that many programmers feel that the above is what XP means by 'pair programming'. This is... somewhat mythical. The footnote on the Wikipedia page make it clear that it is not the intention.

"One of the programmers, the driver, has control of the keyboard/mouse and actively implements the program. The other programmer, the observer, continuously observes the work of the driver to identify tactical (syntactic, spelling, etc.) defects, and also thinks strategically about the direction of the work."

I don't have any particular issue with the Wikipedia page, although it must be noted that the page has more than a few disputed sections. More applicable perhaps is the wiki at http://wiki.c2.com/?PairProgramming

'An ExtremeProgrammingPractice in which two engineers participate in one development effort at one workstation. Each member performs the action the other is not currently doing: While one types in UnitTests the other thinks about the class that will satisfy the test, for example.'

Novices do require a strict framework, but there is value in understanding the precepts that the framework is built to support.

--
--buck

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