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

Defining pair programming

When we are writing code, we are used to being alone, in front of a computer. As you saw in the previous chapter, we can also work in a different way, not just alone. In order to work together, we need to define pair programing and the roles associated with it.

This section will focus on the roles (or call them hats) of pair programming, namely driver and navigator. You might also have the role of a trainer or facilitator when you're doing this for the first time. Let's see what each of these roles entails.

Driver

The driver is the one who will have their hands on the keyboard and be writing the code. All the implementation details are at the latitude of the driver. Small decisions such as what type of variable to use, which programming language construct to use, how to name variables, methods, functions, classes, packages, and so on are a part of the driver's role.

The driver usually explains to the navigator what they are doing...