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Pair programming is an agile software development technique, with two people working together on one terminal. While the first person focuses on syntax and other tactical aspects, the other reviews the code from the larger context perspective.

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We've been utilizing pair programming (or something like it) for a few years. As a senior engineer on the team - I find that pairing actually negatively impacts the team's throughput. The common ...
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Pair programming is quite famous now-a-days. It has several advantages like: Programs with fewer bugs. Post production maintenance cost is much less. Established practices are challenged resulting ...
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As I'm sure most of you are aware; tmux and screen have features that allow the sharing of a concurrent terminal session with a remote host. At first this seems great, and for some purposes it is, ...
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Many people mention that this is a good practice, but the work pace of junior and senior developers are different and, often times, junior developers can feel intimidated by the constant presence of a ...
bfsc's user avatar
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On the software project I'm working there are 4 teams of 6 people. The project itself is a moderately complex distributed system, but the current user stories are mostly about implementing CRUD ...
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There is task that from the business point of view is really critical but, even it has been estimated in 40 days of works [of course worst case], involves a really small part of the project (a couple ...
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I have a stage in an interview process where I am supposed to do pair programming, or at least they want to see me working in Visual Studio with an experienced developer. This is a company promoting ...
Learn Languages From Music's user avatar
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4 answers
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If there's a work that need frontend and backend developers to work together, should they: Pair programming all the times? When it's backend work, frontend developer is navigator, backend developer ...
Paiboon Panusbordee's user avatar
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There is a new developer starting soon. This person is at an entry level but has worked in app support for a couple of years. I asked this question some time ago just before I started training ...
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To me - if you're pair programming - then you don't open your email, or you decide you're cool with the other person looking at it. I've worked with a person who looks away, and expects you not to ...
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In an extreme programming project, programmers do pair programming most of the time. As these pairs also rotate, that is, you pair program with different people, and there is a sense of collective ...
Eduardo Copat's user avatar
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4 answers
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We follow pair programming in our company and always face the issue of balanced and effective pair rotation within the developers on stories. We follow a simple metrics in which every developer's ...
Vivek's user avatar
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Our team uses the Ruby gem hitch to manage pairing. You set it up with a group email address (e.g. [email protected]) and then tell it who is pairing: $ hitch james tiffany Hitch then sets your Git ...
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I am familiar with Agile and Pair Programming (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pair_programming). I thought Pair Programming was used if there was a complex requirement i.e. two sets of eyes is better ...
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I work at a small development company as the lead developer. We have two other developers, as well as my boss who is a developer, but doesn't really do much of the actual coding anymore. The problem ...
Ryan Williams's user avatar
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4 answers
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If it was a 2-point story for one person, would you double it if people are pairing? Pairing isn't always necessarily done 100% of a dev task, so it seems that doubling the story points seems wrong....
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How do you identify users when a programming pair checks in code? I heard a complaint that, often a junior dev will be at the keyboard, using his/her account, but is not going to be the best person to ...
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A common problem in my very small team workflow is handling merges from trunk/stable repositories up to feature branches which are ahead of the trunk or stable versions, but which need to track the ...
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My friend and I decided to create a large programming project together. Before that, I have never worked in a pair (I had quite many projects on my own and at work the boss defined the task for me). ...
John's user avatar
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I'm heading a new team of developers working on a software project that makes use of continuous integration (circleci) w/ a pretty fleshed out suite of busterjs unit/integration/acceptance tests. Our ...
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I am a software engineer for 4 years, and I just changed my company for the first time. Company works with pair programming, and it's been 3 days, I couldn't even write a single line of code. It's so ...
Robert Johnson's user avatar
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There was a mention in the Java Posse Podcast about how teams should be divided up into pairs. However, there was a mention from the lady on the podcast that: "Pairs should be mixed up [sic]" (an ...
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One of my team members, a junior programmer, has impressive programming skills for his level of experience. And during code reviews, I believe in emphasizing learning, not pointing out mistakes. ...
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I know 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, reviews each ...
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Have you had any experience in which a non-IT person works with a programmer during the coding process? It's like pair programming, but one person is a non-IT person that knows a lot about the ...
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My team follows the Scrum development cycle. We have received feedback that our unit testing coverage is not very good. A team member is suggesting the addition of an external testing team to assist ...
TheSilverBullet's user avatar
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I've worked in a few shops where management has passed the idea of pair programming either to me or another manager/developer, and I can't get behind it at all. From a developer stand-point I can't ...
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What tools exist to facilitate pair programming with Visual Studio when the programmers are not in the same physical location? At the moment we are thinking voice (Skype?) plus remote desktop (VNC? ...
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I’ve been working in an eXtreme programming team and doing pair programming for over 7 years in a windows environment. When we first started doing it someone would log in with their windows ...
Martin Hughes's user avatar
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My friend and I usually don't have time to meet up in person to do some real pair programming. Since we want to program together anyway, we turned to the world of collaborative software editing. ...
IAE's user avatar
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What is the best way to ensure that programmers ask for help when they get stuck on a problem, rather than spending too much time trying to figure something out when they've hit a wall? I'm ...
mkopala's user avatar
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11 votes
4 answers
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I'm on a team that is currently using Scrum, and we're considering adding pair programming to help improve the cross-functional skills of the team, as well as help reduce defects with a "two heads are ...
Cliff's user avatar
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2 answers
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In agile pair programming it is recommended to switch pairs every now and then so as to increase the bus factor of the team. That means, most people in the team should work on different parts of the ...
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Flow is a concept introduced by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi; in short, it means to get into the "zone". You feel immersed in your task, focused; the task can be difficult but challenging at the same time. ...
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I really like pair programming for particular projects or features. It can act as an immediate sanity check and increase code coverage across your development team. That said I always seem to run into ...
Pan Thomakos's user avatar
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I am a software engineer engaged in some extracurricular projects outside of my main gig. I was considering hiring a developer on Elance to assist me. Ideally, we would be a collaborative team where ...
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I've heard the person at the keyboard named the "driver", and the other person named the "navigator". I've imagined rally car racers, where the person at the wheel just cannot keep up with everything ...
lance's user avatar
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5 votes
2 answers
636 views

I always want to try some pair programming especially with the one who is more experienced programmer than I am. But how can it be done? Are there any websites where people can collaborate and find ...
Sergey's user avatar
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Performance reviews have come up recently at my work, and I was put in an interesting position. Our team does a lot of pair programming, which has a tendency of averaging out the skill differences ...
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2 answers
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In the company I'm currently working on, we've been doing pair programming for a while now. In the current project, for the last couple of days, we've been trying to make our pair programming a little ...
Edgar Gonzalez's user avatar
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8 votes
2 answers
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Surely two people sitting together doing countless other jobs you would see the same benefits. Why has programming been singled out for this practice?
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8 votes
5 answers
785 views

I was just thinking about pair programming and one thought just crossed my mind that surely at some time two coders are not going to agree and it would kind of turn into a lengthy (maybe heated) ...
Gary Willoughby's user avatar
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The general idea that is espoused by most Agile / XP theorists seems to be that pairs should swap regularly. For example each programmer should swap pairs once per day; half the people swap at the ...
user avatar
20 votes
3 answers
753 views

I've recently started at a new job and pairing has helped me become effective there very quickly. I am, however, having a hard time when we must do brief joint research during our workflow, covering ...
traffichazard's user avatar
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3 answers
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I don't know that it may even make a difference, and I reckon if it did the differences would be cultural rather than technical, but if one were going to set out today (2011) to learn a language, and ...
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16 votes
7 answers
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I've always been intrigued by pair programming, but in 12 years development I've never worked in a place they have employed this practice, so I have always been sceptical as to how people see it. I ...
ozz's user avatar
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5 answers
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Are there specific things that you look out for before getting the team into pair programming? Obviously pairing someone who's great with C++ with another who knows ASP.NET best won't get me far, but ...
Fanatic23's user avatar
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35 votes
6 answers
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I read few articles on web to find out how Agile, XP, Scrum, pair programming are different from each other / related to each other and I derived the following line: Scrum and XP are almost same. XP ...
Gopi's user avatar
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11 votes
1 answer
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The article "Promiscuous Pairing and Beginner’s Mind" (PDF) suggests that you put someone in the pair that knows the least about the particular area of the code base. It also suggests that you swap ...
Don Kirkby's user avatar
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29 votes
11 answers
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I have been offered an interesting job, but there's a big caveat for me: they use pair programming. I hate the idea of pair programming, and I'm probably not suited for it: I like to do frequent ...
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