Is anyone trying this? I’m thinking of making a go at it and I want to get any pointers.
Not in a work/studio environment, but did it back in university days…My pointers would be:
1.) Pair similarly skilled programmers and somewhat similar personalities
- The worst partners are the ones with the biggest egos with the smallest patience who think they can do it faster.
2.) Encourage them to think out loud
- This allows them to discuss their process amongst each other and understand why X way is better than Y, leading to less bugs and more efficiency.
3.) Try to pair folks who don’t have the same focus/specialties
- It’ll increase the chances of getting them to learn something out of it.
Some benefits:
1.) You now have a secondary who can support, maintain, or update the tool down the road.
2.) Partner X will now know some expertise that partner Y has that he/she probably didn’t know before
3.) Less bugs because you have an extra pair of eyes WHILE coding. Code reviews are awesome, but that’s if management allows time for it, and if people have the time to review it. This way it is being reviewed while the driver is coding. Also, ever walked away from your desk/screen only to find bugs when you have ‘fresher’ eyes?
Cool, sounds like its worth a try.
I did this a few times in a production environment and cannot stress how useful it is. I was doing it with my producer when I was at a point where he knew more about Python than I did. He was open to my questions about what he was doing, which in turn improved my understanding of Python.
Has anyone ever tried using GoogleDocs for something like this?