Book Image

Practical Remote Pair Programming

By : Adrian Bolboacă
Book Image

Practical Remote Pair Programming

By: Adrian Bolboacă

Overview of this book

Remote pair programming takes pair programming practices to the next level by allowing you and your team members to work effectively in distributed teams. This helps ensure that you continuously improve code quality, share equal ownership of the code, facilitate knowledge sharing, and reduce bugs in your code. If you want to adopt remote pair programming within your development team, this book is for you. Practical Remote Pair Programming takes you through various techniques and best practices for working with the wide variety of tools available for remote pair programming. You'll understand the significance of pair programming and how it can help improve communication within your team. As you advance, you’ll get to grips with different remote pair programming strategies and find out how to choose the most suitable style for your team and organization. The book will take you through the process of setting up video and audio tools, screen sharing tools, and the integrated development environment (IDE) for your remote pair programming setup. You'll also be able to enhance your remote pair programming experience with source control and remote access tools. By the end of this book, you'll have the confidence to drive the change of embracing remote pair programming in your organization and guide your peers to improve productivity while working remotely.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
1
Section 1: Introduction to Pair Programming
5
Section 2: Remote Pair Programming
9
Section 3: Tools to Enhance Remote Pair Programming

Checking the internet connection

First, we need to make sure our internet connection is good enough. Depending on the tools we use, we might need more or less bandwidth, but we will surely need a stable connection.

Let's get technical. You need a connection that is stable at around 10 Mbit/s download and 5 Mbit/s upload. That is on average. It depends a lot on the tools you use, as some video conferencing or screen sharing tools will have better compression rates than others. If you want a mobile reference, a 4G mobile connection speed is what you need for a good remote pair programming experience.

Preferably, you should have a fiber optic connection. That will make your remote pair programming session seamless from a connectivity point of view. Still, even in this case, your Wi-Fi router can cause problems. Once, I was pairing with my laptop really close to the Wi-Fi router that the laptop could even touch it, and even then the connection was unstable at times. Only after...