InRhythm

Your partners in accelerated digital transformation

pair programming

When to Pair Program

Follow Jack on twitter @JacopoTarantino for other related topics.

Lots of companies embrace pair programming as a way to increase programmer productivity (loosely defined here as delivering “value” which can have many forms, but is generally interpreted as writing more code per day) but is it really that great? I’ve wondered why we should pair program and when is the right time to embrace it as a strategy.

Pair programming, as I know it, came into popular culture as a facet of XP (extreme programming), a development framework that enforces practices that generally improve software quality and responsiveness. The idea is a new incarnation of the old adage “two minds are better than one”. Either way, the idea is right: two people have different histories, cultures, and experiences, and for those reasons they think about things in different ways. When two people work on a problem together they almost always come out with a better solution that if one worked on it alone. So how does this relate to programming?

The Good

Pair programming does reduce bugs

The primary driver for pair programming is to increase quality and decrease bugs. When done well, it does that spectacularly. One study found that pairing reduced bugs in production by 15%!

Pairing does increase code quality

Many of the benefits of pair programming are not actually technical; they’re social. When working with a peer, it’s normal to feel encouraged to do your best, ensuring your coding is clean and avoiding any technical debt that you’ll “fix later”.  When pairing, we tend to do things just a little bit cleaner, make algorithms just a little bit easier to read, name variables a little bit more sensibly. We actually write our unit tests to 100% coverage! With two sets of eyes, the quality is always higher.

The Gotchas

Pair programming does not eliminate bugs.

As much as we’d love for pairing to just eliminate all bugs, it’s just not the reality. Bugs still happen. There are generally a lot fewer of them, but perfect code would require perfect programmers.

Pair programming does not fix bad product direction.

Good projects need very strong product direction. And to be clear, the responsibility for this direction is on everyone, not just “product people”. It begins with asking questions and making informed decisions about work to be done. Then the team needs to thoroughly discuss the work, breaking it down as much as possible to understand the full scope. If this isn’t done properly, deadlines are missed, everyone is stressed, work that should take minutes takes days… Pair programming can’t fix that. Nothing is more important than good product direction.

Pair programming costs a lot.

Like, a lot. One study found that pairing increases the cost of software by 100%. While that seems like a predictable number (1+1=2), it’s actually highly variable. If pairing is used effectively, I would say it strictly costs the amount of time put in, minus the value added. It could be a single-digit percentage. On the other hand, if pairing is done poorly, you’re paying about 300% more. That’s 100% for putting another salaried employee on the same project, 100% for that that employee not adding any value, and 100% for the opportunity cost of other work they could have been doing. Make sure you’re doing it for the right reasons and utilizing the right resources.

You have to do pair programming right for it to mean anything.

Pair programming is a tool meant to help make a difficult problem more digestible. Pair programming done correctly generally means one person is writing code and the other is directing the work. Directing in this case means providing feedback about best practices and constructive criticism. It also means researching those best practices when you don’t know them off the top of your head and taking the time to think deeply about possible edge cases and hangups relevant to the work at hand. Pairs should communicate thoroughly, share all relevant information about their work, and swap duties as often as possible. It’s taxing to think about problems in both a creative and technical way, so it’s better to distribute that work. That’s one big reason that pair programming is such an effective tool.

So when are we supposed to pair program?

Pair program when there is a *very* difficult problem at hand.

If you have a problem you cannot reasonably break a big problem down into smaller parts,  that’s the kind of thing that should be attacked by multiple programmers. An 8-point story should generally never exist in your organization if you’re doing normal web work. Features can almost always be broken down into “front-end” and “back-end” stories. Whole-page mockups can be broken down into component parts. Design and QA phases can also be separated out into their own stories. But a really tough problem is just a really tough problem. Trying to add a new feature to a language is a really tough problem. Trying to figure out how to reduce the latency on database calls is a really tough problem. These are examples of problems that require both creative and technical thinking.

Pair program when 2 programmers are at completely different skill levels.

Pair programming is a remarkably good way to teach junior programmers. Getting to participate live while a more senior programmer talks about how and why they’re doing something is invaluable experience. So is writing code while a more senior programmer coerces better practices on the fly. In my time as a programmer, pairing with somebody significantly more senior than me has been some of the most difficult and most rewarding work I’ve ever done.

Pair program when 2 programmers have completely different skill sets.

If you choose not to break down a story into easily divisible parts, having 2 programmers with complementary skill sets can be very rewarding for both the programmers and the codebase. Pairing programmers who generally only work front-end or back-end can get an end-to-end feature out the door, or you might have a Postgres expert pairing with a Scala expert to make your database calls more efficient. When these 2 people work together live, they absorb a lot of knowledge about each other’s domain and ensure there’s no aspect of the project that’s neglected.

Pair program when you’re both new to a language or framework.

Sometimes you wind up in a situation where nobody is an expert. Even if you’re working on a trivial feature and just wandered into a very difficult problem (see above). This is an excellent opportunity! You end up with two programmers working through a difficult problem and contributing their individual skills to build a better product, helping each other learn, and with a redundancy in the skill growth of your programmers. This is important because the skills in your organization should never be concentrated in one person. Having programmers pair on new languages and/or frameworks ensures that there are a minimum of two people who can work on this in the future.

This post is another one by InRhythm’s own Jack Tarantino. For the full post, check out the original “when to pair program” on his website.

Who runs the world? Code, Code: What Development Can Teach Us About Creativity and Being Prepared for the Future

I recently read a LinkedIn post by Dan Robinson on the negative effects of social media and sharing designs and it has caused me to wonder if designers can learn more from developers than the value of coding as a skill. Maybe us designers can learn a little something about what it means to have a strong community to draw inspiration from. In his post, Robinson explores issues of self esteem and what inspiration, if any, designers can and should take from others. He highlights a common concern that we may be ‘comparing ourselves to death’ not only as individual human beings with social media and how we compare to others, but also as UX and visual designers because of constant exposure to what others are doing. Harold Bloom was an early analyst of the role of influence and peers on creativity, including his 1973 work called ‘The Anxiety of Influence’, and how the issues of feeling confident in designs will always plague designers, who often are self reflexive in their outlook to begin with.

Being a designer isn’t just about finding solutions – it’s about critiquing a state to improve it for the future, and as a result, criticism is often the default for many of us. Social media, and communities of practice, have value in learning the craft of design, and designer communities like Behance andDribbble help as a place to explore and share concepts and drafts. But, there is a downside to all of this sharing – Dribbble’s concept of a ‘shot’ often leads to designs which only look beautiful in a small, 400×300 pixels canvas. Good designers can become wracked with self consciousness if their design doesn’t look anywhere near as perfect as a final product on Dribbble. Ironically enough, the less glamorous design could be the right solution for a client and their customers even if it doesn’t win any design awards for Best Use of Flat Design on Buttons, or get voted up as noteworthy.  When we do see the perfect final version, we don’t get a feel for all the struggles which occurred behind the scenes. We don’t see the designs which were thrown out, and more disturbingly, few requirements or constraints (business or technical) are stated in a case study that accompanies that final image. Often there’s no case study at all – just an image, and people may see these final designs as solutions worth emulating. When designing more complex, enterprise transactional applications, is a simple, elegant, stylized shot found on Dribbble really the best source of inspiration? Should redesigns that focus on polish and the continual sharing of final products really be leading designers to late night bouts of existential anxiety?

How do other creative professions in technology – particularly, developers – deal with anxiety from creativity and comparing their work to others? What can designers learn from developers on how to feel confident with the sharing of their work? From the outside, developer communities appear to be less anxious and ultimately better prepared for the changes of being a professional knowledge worker due to a number of key practices about creativity which have developed as accepted standards. It’s not that designers and other professions don’t have the equivalent practices, but there may be a focus more on processes and practices in the building, and comfort in the ‘draft’ state rather than a focus on a final, finished, polished product. Some of the best developer practices when it comes to creativity include (in no particular order):

  • Pair programming as a practice: A core part of Agile development is developers pairing together to solve a problem. It’s not always a more experienced dev with a beginner – there’s an active sense of people who can be equally experienced working together through the best way to code. You can have two developers well versed in Ruby, who differ in how they construct code. There are often multiple ways to frame any solution, with no clear obvious direction. With pairing, you work through the options, put together multiple minds and find that best solution as you evaluate the options in real time. I’ve paired with designers before, and there is an active movement towards Pair Design as an initiative, but as a rule, it’s rare as an established, encouraged practice. There’s no reason why it should be, especially if multiple designers are working at the same company to help achieve consistent brand standards across products with multiple UIs. Smart companies have an active internal designer community, but in the education of designers, we rarely talk about pairing with individual designers as a practice – it’s usually one designer, and one product. Having an extra mind and set of eyes can help you see things that were missed the first time. I’ve worked with developers who sit with each other – different pairs on different days, and it’s what works for many of them.  Contrast that with the cliche of the Genius Designer silently sitting in the corner working away in his black beret. Perhaps pair designing might bring some of those solitary folks out of their shell and they will recognize the value of learning by collaboration. Maybe this will diminish the Genius Designer myth, too.
  • Communities of practice expressed in products, not just discussion: Developers have code repositories where hacking, experimentation and continual iteration are welcomed in addition to the usual forums for communication. Their tools are built out, languages created, and snippets shared on GitHub or other sites where the purpose is about sharing as much as an active finished product. Granted, it’s easier to share a code snippet than the outputs of a design especially concerning NDAs, and again, designers actively work to share their equivalent tool libraries, templates and pattern language libraries. With developers there’s a narrative that is unconsciously spoken – if you don’t like something and want to fix it, then just fork it, and make it your own. Customize it, hack it, tweak it, build it. We’re starting to see that with designers and developers building third party tools to work with Sketch and other applications, effectively building an ecosystem around the act of creating.  The sheer volume of activity on Github alone indicates that developers have beat designers to the punch, embracing the ‘building is part of being a community’ mission. Creativity for developers is building – constantly, and encouraging others to build off what they’ve done. Any hackathon is an expression of creativity and it can be astounding to watch that creativity happen. When we say ‘creative’, how often do we default to a painting, novel or dance performance? Perhaps we can see hackathons as another kind of performance where the code and collaboration are a dance that can be just as beautiful to watch.
  • Constant evolution of languages: This is a touchy subject, as the amount of coding languages and frameworks is exploding, and at a certain point there may be too many of them for any one developer to keep up with. Still, the amount of active development of new languages demonstrates how developers are constantly pushing the boundaries of what they can do with code, and exploring new ways to do it. Everything we once could do in Flash and Flex is now being replicated with CSS3. Our languages will continue to multiply as our interactive experiences online evolve, and as the devices and ways to experience a product continue to proliferate. As a career in development, it can be exhausting to constantly learn new languages, but as a form of art and creation, it shows people creating. Photoshop was a standard for so many years, and designers are only now in the last couple of years successfully evolving their languages and tools to meet the needs of these more complex and sophisticated products.  In creating new languages, the practice is less about comparing yourself to others’ output than creating something new for the sake of trying to solve a problem.
  • A commitment to continuous learning: As more languages, tools, and standards evolve in how we build products, the only constant in responding to change is adaptation and a commitment to learning. Continuous integration isn’t just about checking in your code – it’s about how we learn and keep learning, keeping our eyes open for what to learn, building upon your existing knowledge and seeing where the past and present apply to the future. Everyone – designers, developers, product, sales and more – has to commit to constant openness to learning and evolving one’s skills. But with development, that learning is embraced at a hyper accelerated rate. You may not need to be an expert in everything, but you need to have an awareness of what matters in technology, and for some concepts, at least a recognition that you have a gap which learning can address, and if you need to know about something quickly, the best source of learning is to start mastering it. Thanks to the always-in-flux nature of Web and development languages and practices, you always have to be actively learning – and there’s a potential for developers to be doing so online quickly.  It’s no surprise that there are more varied ways of learning development and computer science outside of traditional education – the rise of online education points to evolving how we learn, and that evolution speaks to how development addresses creativity, too. No surprise – the rise of the Maker movement has a strong tech focus at its core, and the message of the movement is a positive one. Anyone can be a Maker no matter their education or skills, as long as they’re willing to try creating.

No matter what the medium, creative people will always be strivers, dreamers, the people who crave more, who ask why – and often why not. No matter what the medium (paper and pen, keyboard, paintbrush, or whatever comes next in the future) striving is one of the passions which drives us to improve our craft and seek out new ways to design or develop the products and services that change lives.  The trick for creativity is to remember it’s not a race to compete with the Jones’s and the Dribbbles – it’s to start embracing your inner creative spirit and hacking for the sake of hacking.