Effective Collaborative Programming3

Agile NCR 2009 July 18, 2009 Effective Agile Software Development with Collaborative Programming

Agenda

What is Collaborative Programming?

A day in solo programming

A day in pair programming

Economics of collaborative programming

Cultural and psychological challenges

How to do it?

When not to do it?

Distributed pair programming

Need

What it takes

Tools

Demo

When to do it and when not

Questions

Collaborative programming

Involves two programmers side-by-side on the design, coding and testing of a piece of software.

The concept of driver and navigator

Constant active review, knowledge sharing and design discussions

Pair programming transforms what has traditionally been a solitary activity into an interactive & cooperative effort.

A day of a solo programmer

Challenges of solo programming

Focus Factor

Syntactical errors causing at least 10% loss in productivity

Passive reviews

No knowledge sharing

A day in collaborative programming

Minimal distractions as pairing requires respect for each other.

Navigator catches the syntactical errors even before you compile the code.

You find an ACTIVE reviewer.

Knowledge sharing in its true form.

Design quality

Economics of pair programming

Why should I invest for two programmers for the same task???

For any two programmers, no matter how good he or she is, if we get them to sit together, the value of their work will be greater than if they sit apart.

Cultural and psychological challenges

Some people prefer working alone

Move from Waterfall to Agile world (no heroics anymore)‏

Egos and personality conflicts

Intimidation by expert

How to do it?

Agree on one tiny goal at a time

Rely on your partner, support your partner.

Talk a lot

Switch roles often

Write unit test first

Pay attention – don’t check your email, digg etc

The person who knows less about the system or language should do most of the driving, to ensure that the novice stays engaged. You learn more through your fingers than through your eyes.

Ping-pong pairing

When not to do it?

When reading about a library that might help later on

Spiking a complex solution or debugging a tricky error with someone that has an experience gap.

The number of tasks that require pairing is a lot higher than the number of tasks that don't.

The Need

Nothing is as effective as collocated team and pair programming. However when teams ARE distributed, we attempt to reach the same level of productivity as for collocated teams - Welcome to the world of Distributed Pair Programming.

Trivia

Department of Computer Science, North Carolina State University conducted an experiment to compare the different working arrangements of student teams developing object-oriented software. The results of the experiment indicate that it is feasible to develop software using distributed pair programming, and that the resulting software is comparable to software developed in collocated teams.

The University's technique is based on the emerging software engineering methodology – “pair-programming” combined with nearly 20 years of widespread and active research in collaborative software systems.

What it takes?

Lots and lots and lots of communication.

Hardware Challenges

Software Challenges

Network Challenges, pair switching

Cultural Challenges

Time Differences

Tools

Microsoft Office Communicator (OCS)‏

Skype Mikogo

Cola Eclipse plugin

Adobe Acrobat Connect

NetMeeting

VNC

XPairtise - A Distributed Pair Programming Plug-in For Eclipse

Sangam – A Distributed Pair Programming Plug-in for Eclipse - Department of Computer Science, North Carolina State University

PCAnywhere

SelfLanguage

SqueakSmalltalk - has a shared desktop component named Nebraska

RemoteAdmin from Famatech -- far faster than VNC and far cheaper than PCAnywhere

SpeakFreely - win32/linux voice chat

Messengers

Baseline : Follow KISS principles - high quality cam, mic, headphones

Tools

Experiments by some universities –

( Carolina State University, University of California et al )‏

Virtual WorkSpace was intended as an environment to enable distributed collaboration over a network. It depends heavily on computer-generated graphics and virtual reality devices as well.

ClearBoard was similarly a non-co-located collaboration support system that allowed two users to appear to sit face to face, and see the shared work between them

The members of a pair viewed a common PC display using desktop sharing software; They trailed Microsoft NetMeeting, Symantec’s PCAnywhere, and VNC. They used headsets and microphones to speak to each other, and text chat for communications as well. They used several instant messaging programs (Yahoo Messenger, PalTalk, AOL Messenger) before implementing the project. The final experiment was run with NetMeeting , as this program provided PC sharing, text, audio, and video in one platform.