Re: Pair Programming (WAS: Have opening for ROR engineers)

Rails
1

On Sat, May 23, 2009 at 7:42 AM, Phlip [email protected] wrote:

(Y’all do practice Pair Programming, don’t you??)

Nope. Never had the opportunity. You? :slight_smile:

It’s an interesting idea, with at least one major practical drawback,
but I wonder what percentage of Rails development is actually
being done in a Pair Programming environment.

–
Hassan S. ------------------------ [email protected]

2

Statistics on this may be quite variable as I know of a few companies
local to me that are on and off with pair programming. I have done
pair programming at one job and seen it very successful at a friends
job. I use it when I teach RoR workshops, and I find it is quite
helpful but does present some requirements: a base line of education
and problem solving abilities.

Overall I think it is a far superior way to develop software
(especially web software) because I do believe more heads yield better
code. But again, it requires those heads to have that base line
education (a B.S. in Computer Science… or some other marker for a
starting place) otherwise you will end up with a Sr. developer and a
Jr. developer who never achieve one of the most beneficial goals of
PP-- shared wisdom and an increase in skill. If the individuals in the
pair are too far apart one will get left behind or one could
potentially feel frustrated far too often.

I’ve tried working with people far above me, far below me, and right
around the same grounds. Really is fascinating what you can teach/
learn from pairing though.

On May 23, 8:32 am, Hassan S. [email protected]

3

I fully agree with WJS. There are different expectations in pairing,
between developers and non-developers. My post was related to
developer pairing, but I find it helpful to have a marketing guy next
to me at times (like when working on an Interface that I am not
familiar with).

Also, one of the reasons I love Ruby is how readable the code is if
you follow the conventions. Same for rails, since it builds off of
Ruby. Naming conventions in this framework have made the quality of
code so much better and it is amazing to see a community of RoR
developers tightly bound to following conventions. Cheers.

4

On May 23, 2:32 pm, Mike R. [email protected] wrote:

education (a B.S. in Computer Science… or some other marker for a
starting place) otherwise you will end up with a Sr. developer and a
Jr. developer who never achieve one of the most beneficial goals of
PP-- shared wisdom and an increase in skill. If the individuals in the
pair are too far apart one will get left behind or one could
potentially feel frustrated far too often.

I’d like to weigh into this one, even though it may be straying a
little off topic for a Ruby on Rails group, as I believe pair-
programming benefits always far outweigh any frustrations. Even with a
non-developer project manager background, I’ve paired with my
developers on small projects and have been able to add value and keep
the code flowing. The values I may add, such as SQL knowledge or just
spelling consistency, formatting, etc. really help, not to mention
just plain brainstorming an idea as to an approach to get it something
that is “stuck” moving forward.

In fact, geniuses like Martin F. have written that really good
code is readable by anyone, without much commenting.
–my $.02 --Wayne