[Cialug] Tag Team Programming

Fri Apr 9 09:28:18 CDT 2010

I worked on one project with a partner.  We were being pushed to develop a new system in a new language.  I helped write and interpret the requirements document and my partner, a consultant with experience in the language we were using, wrote the code I didn't have the experience in the language to be able to write.  

After an initial week of working together, we worked together for about a day each week, in two half day sessions.  I'd muddle along on my own in between times while he went around and helped other developers.  As time went on our sessions together became shorter and more frequent.  We got down to about half an hour to an hour or so at a time, but almost every day.  By doing this sharing one consultant between several developers we made the best advantage of a 'high cost' resource.

So in this case it worked really well, as I was an expert in the why we were doing something how we were doing it in a procedural sense (the new system was a replace to the system that I'd worked on for 20 years) and he was an expert in how we accomplished what needed to be done in a code sense.

Originally he was to answer my code questions, review my code twice a week and make suggestions on how to improve it, but we quickly migrated to sitting side by side in front of a big monitor and pushing the keyboard back and forth.  It worked really well for both of us.  He suggested working like that with the other local developers, mostly by just coming over and sitting beside them when they had a question, and it worked out for them too.  I'm guessing that working together only 1 day a week cut the development time by about 50%.

So at least in my case, when we were working together I'd explain why I did something the way I did and he'd explain why I might want to change it and then we decided together which way to proceed.  The conclusion was a mutual agreement and sometimes we went my way and sometimes we went his way, and the code benefited from both of our experience.

Management however saw this as two people doing one person's work and terminated the practice so I haven't worked on any other projects with a partner programmer.  Since he was helping 4 other programmers beside me and had some coding assignments of his own, my contention was that 6 people were going the work that should be expected from 10 or 11 people.    I'd say that was a pretty good deal.

So, was he the genius or was I.  I think the answer to that question is "yes", just at different things.

Murray McKee 
Operating Systems Engineer
WFFIS - Wells Fargo Financial Information Systems 
800 Walnut Street
MAC F4030-037
Des Moines, IA 50309-3605
WORK (515)557-6127 Cell (NEW) (515) 343-6630  FAX (515) 557-6046
MurrayMcKee at WellsFargo.com 
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-----Original Message-----
From: cialug-bounces at cialug.org [mailto:cialug-bounces at cialug.org] On Behalf Of kristau
Sent: Thursday, April 08, 2010 8:30 PM
To: Central Iowa Linux Users Group
Subject: Re: [Cialug] Tag Team Programming

On Thu, Apr 8, 2010 at 1:50 PM, Josh More
<MoreJ at alliancetechnologies.net> wrote:
> It works well if your partner isn't an idiot.  ;)

So, if your partner is a genius, which partner does that make you? :P

-- 
Tired programmer
Coding late into the night
The core dump follows
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