[LRUG] "Designer code": with Ruby refactoring exercises

[Julian Fitzell]

This is slightly tangential, but I've been running around over the past 6
months giving "Wolf Pack Programming" workshops at conferences. This is a
slightly unusual methodology we've been experimenting with that uses wolf
hunting behaviour as a metaphor for team development:
http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/main/2010/10/wolf_pack_programming/

The cool thing is that developers work in "packs" of 2-10 but all of them
always have their own workstation; they all collaborate simultaneously on a
single live codebase. The interesting thing (in the context of this
discussion) we've observed in our experiments is that members of the packs
very often naturally form into pairs or triples (groups of three) at certain
stages of the process. Because they all have their own interfaces, though,
they can switch very quickly between coding, reading what others are doing,
looking at other parts of the code, or even researching something on the
internet. It works surprisingly well.

I've also observed something else I found interesting about pairing. The
packs are encouraged to share information aloud around the table, so the
whole pack can keep in sync and avoid stepping on each other's toes. In a
couple of workshops, we've had a lot of people fail to bring laptops and
people have been forced to share. In packs with a lot of people pairing on
shared laptops, the group communication around the table seems to
effectively stop. I don't know if that has any reflection on communication
in a traditional pairing situation but I found it interesting nonetheless.

There's not much information out there on the process itself yet, but we're
nearly finished a white paper, so I can pass it along to anyone who's
interested when it's done.

Julian


On 11-01-10 12:42 AM, "Priit Tamboom" <priit at mx.ee> wrote:

> Wow, thanks for a great responses and Chris, thanks for mentioning
> tmux, I'll definitely investigate it further.
> 
> So I can sum it up pair programming definitely needs some level of
> desktop harmonization, weather I like it or not.
> 
> However, I guess my surprise comes because I have done some
> environment changes (Estonia, China, Spain, UK), so that's why it
> never occurred to me before that I can enforce unified desktop
> environment.
> 
> Anyhow, thanks again and see you soon at LRUG,
> 
> Cheers,
> Priit
> 
> PS. ...mm I see there was no strong negative response, so it might
> mean it's still not mainstream enough ;-)
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