Windows & .NET Watch: Problematic pair programming
March 1, 2010 —
(Page 1 of 2)
Pair programming is certainly the least adopted of the Extreme Programming practices. Given the overwhelming success of the other practices advocated by Kent Beck in “Extreme Programming Explained”—unit testing, planning from user stories, continuous integration and dramatically shorter release cycles—the failure of pair programming to become a standard is notable.
Lately, my colleague Carlos Lima and I have been experimenting with remote pair programming. Remote pair programming is especially interesting, as more and more teams have at least some developers working remotely. Since I live in Hawaii and Carlos in Brazil, remote development for our clients is a given.
Not to sound immodest, but Carlos and I are both very effective solo developers and there’s no danger that one of us will feel they are “carrying” the other. As a matter of fact, the opposite turns out to be true; one of the immediate frustrations with pair programming is that you’re walking the path differently than you would alone.
We were frustrated by the immaturity of tools specifically designed for remote pairing. We could not find any solutions for using Visual Studio or JetBrains' IDEs together, and NetBeans appears to have dropped its collaboration features. We used Eclipse’s Saros project for a few days, but ultimately dropped it in the face of stability issues (the only thing worse than working with an unstable environment is working with two of them and endlessly repeating over Skype “Did you get that?” or “Hold on, my system froze."). We also tried Mozilla’s Bespin, but while it has promise, we didn’t think it was yet a viable choice for actual development.
In the end, we dropped back to “the simplest thing that could possibly work,” and shared a screen with VNC while talking over Skype. VNC is available on all modern operating systems and allows for remote control of the screen and mouse. While it’s not nearly as “cool” as Saros’ or Bespin’s multiple cursors and simultaneous editing, VNC is pretty darn bulletproof.
The biggest problem with VNC was that, for both performance and coordination issues, we ended up using a viewport that was a fraction of our monitors’ capabilities. Once you get used to having three monitors, programming at 1024x768 feels like you’re peering down an arthroscope. While using Saros, on the other hand, we could set up our own IDEs as we liked, jump out to our own Internet browsers to Google for answers, and even briefly pair program while communicating over IM instead of Skype.
Related Search Term(s): Extreme Programming
Share this link: http://sdt.bz/34158
Most Read Latest News Blog Resources
Zeichick’s Take: Radio moves from analog waveforms to digital packets
Streaming radio highlights the need for streaming applications to be designed to take up as little bandwidth as possible
|
|
Taking enterprise architecture to the business side
Startup Corso is bringing out a cloud-based planning platform that ties into business plans
|
|
Appcelerator Acquires Cocoafish to Add Instant Mobile Cloud Capabilities to its Industry Leading Titanium Platform
Appcelerator Offers Messaging, Social, Location and Storage Mobile Cloud Services to All Mobile App Publishers
|
|
ComponentOne Releases a Collection of 40+ UI Widgets Powered by HTML5 and jQuery
ComponentOne has announced the 2012 release of Wijmo: a kit of UI widgets for HTML5 and jQuery development
|
Taking enterprise architecture to the business side
Startup Corso is bringing out a cloud-based planning platform that ties into business plans
|
|
Top five apps to manage your workload
Web applications offer new ways to track your “to-do” lists
|
|
Not so fast when it comes to testing in the cloud
Developers face outsourcing, virtual lab management and mobile devices as obstacles
|
|
Xceed releases UX-focused suite for Microsoft’s WPF
"Blendables" helps match user experiences to developer visions
|
Are you at risk for burnout?
Burnout is a severe problem and it can strike at any time. Here's how to tell if you are nearing the edge.
|
|
Agility, mom, and apple pie
If we're to evaluate the state-of-the-art in software development, we should start with the values espoused in the Agile Manifesto.
|
|
RIM woos developers with free tablet
How do you get more apps ported to the BlackBerry PlayBook? By giving every developer a free tablet, of course!
|
|
GitHire: Use Headhunters to Find Your Perfect Programmer
Are you a hiring manager tired of scouring the job boards? Check out this new service that will find 5 people interested in your jobs.
|
The Hidden Costs of Software Licensing
Moving beyond paper-based software licensing to more flexible, software-based licensing is a business decision. There is a growing trend tow...
|
|
Case Study: You May Need a Development Mechanic
As a contractor for a major financial player in Germany, SOBEGE, a German-based consultancy specializing in embedded IT and web services, wa...
|
|
Ensuring Software Quality at a Major International Bank
One of the world’s leading international banks has adopted AgitarOne technology for delivering generated unit tests for their Java software...
|
|
Load Testing Adobe Flex Applications
Adobe Flex applications may be different from applications you’ve worked with before. For classic HTML web applications, the server does all...
|