Pair Programming – Learning Accelerated
February 23rd, 2007
For the past week I have been having my first real taste of pair programming and “real” test-driven development. One thing that I have noticed is the huge increase in learning that it provides. As a programmer, there is a limit to what you can teach yourself. By pairing, you remove that limit and accelerate the learning. I have learned things this week that I would have never learned on my own (and the week isn’t even over yet). My coding skills have grown more in a week then they did in a month at my last employer.
Categories: Agile, Programming
What did you learn?
I learned mostly what it takes to make manageable, communicative code and how to refactor code so that it meets those requirements. My post on immutable code was one idea of how to write code that I was also introduced to. In addition, I learned a lot about Eclipse by both working with it and watching others work with it.
Probably the biggest thing I learned boils down to how to program and how to implement various different design patterns. Things like strategy pattern and having factory methods on classes so you control exactly how objects are created.