Windows & .NET Watch: Problematic pair programming
March 1, 2010 —
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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
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