[IxDA Discuss] Paired programming... not two off-topic I hope

[Robert Barlow-Busch]

On 22-Jun-06, at 12:15 PM, Robert Hoekman, Jr. wrote:
> I used to do a little paired programming myself. We only had a  
> couple of
> developers, so it was always the same people, but it worked great.  
> we got a
> lot done in a very short amount of time - far more than if we had  
> worked
> alone, and it made programming far more enjoyable.

I'm told that overall productivity is supposed to drop a bit (15%  
comes to mind?) in terms of lines of code written per time period.  
Apparently you're trading this off for better quality and a shorter  
project duration in the end due to fewer rewrites and bug fixes. Can  
anyone confirm this?

Anyway, despite this assertion, everyone here has been surprised at  
the speed the programmers have been able to achieve -- most  
especially the programmers themselves. And they swear the quality's  
higher too.

I suspect this speed is attributable in large part to a core tenet of  
XP: "Do the simplest thing possible." This means the programmers  
write the simplest code *that meets the expressed requirements*.  
Traditionally, they'd attempt to make the code more flexible to  
account for new requirements in the future; but lessons from software  
development indicate this tradeoff isn't worth making generally.

As a side effect, I've had many wonderful conversations in which  
programmers push back on UI designs. "Can't we make it any simpler?  
Is that feature *really* needed? If not, let's forget about it."  
Fantastic stuff, that.

-- 
Robert Barlow-Busch
Practice Director, Interaction Design
Quarry Integrated Communications Inc.
rbarlowbusch at quarry.com
(519) 570-2020

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