We may be doing a ping-pong pair demo

Started discussing Distributed pairing. Problem was raised of how to schedule pairing across timezones.

Suggestion was to set up a continuous distributed round robin pairing session "pair roulette"

Scott has a slide deck... link?

Goal: "High quality, long-term, maintainable code"

A good way of informal paring: just ask someone for help.

Benefits:

• "Pairs handle interruptions better than individuals"
• Real-time code review
• Mentoring helps spread knowledge (both ways) 
• "Opportunities to Argue" (reason-out code to a better result)

Take breaks from pairing, e.g. pair for 45 minutes & take 15 minute break (i.e.: Pomodoro Technique). Pairing is intense.

Idea: Use "obviously ridiculous" name for something to get past the block on coming up with a good name. Refactor later.

Eg. DoSomethingWith(new Monkey());

Three 'A's of TDD

Arrange, Act, Assert

Ping-pong paring defined: (see also http://www.peterprovost.org/blog/post/Micro-Pairing-Defined.aspx )

Person 1:

• Write Test

Person 2:

• Write minimal amount of code needed to pass test.
• Write another test.

Person 1:

• Write minimal amount of code needed to pass test.
• Write another test.

(repeat)

Spent 30 mins doing ping-pong pairing session building a Stack class

Identified "Challenge" concept - if someone writes too much code, the partner issues a challenge to comment out some production code leaving the tests passing. Challengee then gets to write a test for the commented code.

CinemaDrape - blots out screen except for what you are focusing on