Pair Programming Team

Definition

Pair Programming Team

a team consisting of two programmers who sit side-by-side at a single computer and who closely collaborate to produce production software components, whereby one programmer programs while the other programmer technically evaluates the first programmer’s software in real time as it is developed

Classification

As illustrated in the preceding figure, Pair Programming Team is part of the following inheritance hierarchy:

• Type: Concrete
• Superclass: Engineering Team
• Subclasses:
  • None

Responsibilities

The team-specific responsibilities of a Pair Programming Team are to:

• Design production, reuse, refactoring, and documentation
• Programming of production software including reuse, refactoring, debugging, and documentation via comments
• Unit and integration testing
• Technical evaluation (in real time) of design, programming, and testing
• Close collaboration (i.e., sitting side by side sharing the same computer

Roles

A pair programming team typically consists of two persons, each of which plays the following roles:

• Software Designer, who designs the resulting software components.
• GUI Designer, who designs the graphical user interfaces.
• Programmer, who implements the software components.
• Test Engineer, who performs unit and software integration testing.
• Quality Engineer, who performs quality control of the resulting design, software, and tests.

Tasks

A pair programming team typically performs the following tasks.

• Software Component Design:
  • Design Reuse
  • Design Production
  • Design Refactoring
  • Design Documentation
• Software Component Implementation:
  • Implementation Reuse
  • Programming
  • Data Generation
  • Debugging
• Unit Testing and Software Integration Testing:
  • Test Reuse
  • Test Design
  • Test Implementation
  • Test Execution
  • Test Reporting
• Quality Engineering:
  • Quality Control - Design Evaluation
  • Quality Control - Implementation Evaluation
  • Quality Control - Test Evaluation

Work Products

A pair programming team typically produces the following work products:

• Data Components
• Software Components
• Associated unit and software integration test work products:
  • Test Harnesses
  • Test Scripts
  • Test Suites
  • Test Cases
  • Test Data

Guidelines

• Experience using pair programming is mixed with some research showing significant advantages in both quality and productivity, whereas other research shows significant decreased productivity with only marginal increased quality. Much research is limited to small university pilot studies. A major evaluation of Canadian companies showed that pair programming was rarely used successfully in practice, and then mostly in the form of short duration sessions primarily for the purpose of mentoring less experienced staff.
• Pair programming is strongly promoted by the eXtreme Programming (XP) community, which combines pair programming with many other specific methodology choices. Care must be taken when instantiating the OPF to produce an extreme programming or development method so that the choices of process components and their tailoring produce an endeavor-specific process that is internally consistent and also consistent with the XP philosophy.
• Pair programming emphasizes refactoring, iteration, and test first unit testing to ensure local quality by having both “programmers” do almost all tasks jointly so that each immediately evaluates the work products of the other as they are produced.
• Because of the small size of pair programming teams, there are often numerous pair programming teams on medium and large sized projects.
• It is often difficult to staff pair programming teams so that its members can effectively perform all of the tasks that would be performed by many specialists and several larger teams.
• The pair programming team may develop internal data components, while the content management team may develop user-facing data components.