Pair programming

Laura Domingo Mellado & Irene M. Ordóñez Alfaya

One of the methodology that we learn in Adalab was the pair programming. Pair programming is a method that you can use for work where two people work on one computer. Four eyes for one job.

In this methodology of work, the team has two role, one of the people is the controller and the other is the observer.

• The controller: It is the person who writes.
• The observer: It is the person who reviews the lines of code that the controller writes, and presents ideas.

The utility of this is when you have a person that didn’t write the code, they can help:

• Grammatically: this is positive because the external person saw the orthography mistakes and missing code.
• Strategies: this allows two different views of a project, producing more ideas to deal with the code and make a final code more efficient, clean and clear.
• Learning: this method helps improve both people, because both learn about the other opinions.
• Support: it has been shown that working as a couple allows these people to have greater confidence in themselves.

However, conflicts may arise:

• Team-building and communication: This allows the coders to see different visions and reach an agreement, favors both people. You learn to work as a couple and you can extrapolate to all kinds of areas such as group meetings and personal scope.

This roles changes with assiduity, and this favors:

• You can have a more open mind.
• You have a better relationship with your partner.
• And you can change to another partner, and with this you can have more active relationship with other people in your team.

At the company level, it may be thought that putting two programmers to work at the same time for the same task in a single computer and therefore a single code is unproductive at an economic level (two people one job).

But really the code becomes faster, with fewer errors, more clearly and with a more optimized code.

Therefore, the code is better and economically efficient, since the time to make the code ends up being shorter.

We know about our experience with these methods, the satisfaction in your code, and the things you can learn are very big. It is probably impossible to progress in your coding very quickly without this methodology.