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

Understanding how remote access tools work

In my experience, the video conferencing tools with remote access are not that great for remote access. And, I guess, I wrote the reason for this in the preceding paragraph. Remote access requires a lot of attention to many specific details and a ton of continuous testing with an operating system's changes, and if you just add remote access as an extra to a video conferencing tool, you will treat it as an extra entity.

Lag is a big issue when talking about remote access. All the video conferencing tools with remote access features that I have used so far have issues with lag. This is great if you want a fast pairing session of only 10 minutes. However, after a while, the lag becomes annoying, tiring, and you start wishing for a better tool to use. Lag is the killer of any good remote pair programming experience. That is the reason why I prefer pairing in a code editor with an add-on that permits remote pairing: the lag is almost gone...