₦airaland Forum

^^Continuing down the article:

,
However, a 2007 meta-analysis concluded that "pair programming is not uniformly beneficial or effective" because many other factors besides the choice of whether to use pair programming have large effects on the outcome of a programming task.[7] The meta-study found that pair programming tends to reduce development time somewhat and produces marginal positive effects on code quality, but that pair programming requires significantly more developer effort; that is, it is significantly more expensive than solo programming. The authors suggest that studies of pair programming suffer from publication bias whereby studies that would not show that pair programming is beneficial were either not undertaken, not submitted for publication, or not accepted for publication. They conclude that "you cannot expect faster and better and cheaper."

Even though coding is often completed faster than when one programmer works alone, total programmer time (number of programmers × time spent) increases. A manager needs to balance faster completion of the work and reduced testing and debugging time against the higher cost of coding. The relative weight of these factors can vary from project to project and task to task. The benefit of pairing is greatest on tasks that the programmers do not fully understand before they begin: that is, challenging tasks that call for creativity and sophistication.[8] On simple tasks, which the pair already fully understands, pairing results in a net drop in productivity. Productivity can also drop when novice-novice pairing is used without sufficient availability of a mentor to coach them.[10]

And, to the issues I slightly raised earlier (now per the [wiki] link):

Disengagement
Watch the Master
Silence

Now, to rephrase my question, how efficient it this for a small software company with constrained budget (and considering the potential for those 3 problems)?

@logica: Oh, I see your point now, not disagreeing to that.

Per #3, PP is great like you said, when there's good rapport (and the dev're are skilled) and every dev'er knows their "pair" is not trying to flex "chop" (more often than not they are and end up arguing over trivialities).

@csharpjava

csharpjava:
No it does not work that way, the way it works is that today one developer sits and watch the other do the coding, then tomorrow the developer coding today sits and watch the developed that was watching yesterday, do the coding today.

Is this really efficient? I think switching programmer after milestones (but then, that's from my xprince).

Never seen this PCCM thing before, so much to learn, so little time (*sighs*). Can you send me a reference paper or link that expatiates on this? Your point on it wasn't very clear too, please clarify.

logica:
1 => It will be tough to have a single developer work on an Agile project.

2 => The customer rep I mentioned does not need to be affiliated with the customer, but he needs to understand the customer needs to a tee. Without this, you will end up developing software to your own taste and not to the customer's taste which might lead to rejection of the software and wasted effort (having to go back and redesign, etc). So somebody has to be there to keep an eye as things progress and speak from the POV of the customer.

Now back to Pair Programming:
3. => Firstly, there is always that stage immediately after coding called "Code Review". How often do people actually do that? It usually ends up being skipped because a lot of work needs to be done and code review,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pair_programming

4. => There are way more advantages beside embedding code review in the code development cycle, and the other major one is knowledge sharing/transfer (and it can be bidirectional).

#1. I disagree, on enterprise projects, YES, otherwise, NO. (research has it that the maximum code base a developer can understand is ~10,000 lines). Don't forget that this methods assumes a significant level of experience, either way, it could be a very bad idea enterprise or not.

#2: That is a quandary. The point of agile is to involve the customer, not a rep, a customer with direct stake in the outcome of the project, as summerized:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

#3. I have no problem with PP, though I don't see the need for a developer sitting over another's shoulder and probing design/algorithm choices (a recipe for fist fights ) on a micro level when tool like GitHub could let you do in-line code review per commits. Just encourage best practices, have a team mentor and everyone check-in often.

#4. Extending #3, you can even, with github in-line code review turn those knowledge into documentation for future generations; that probably beats having to deal with some developers bad breath all day .

^^ I said "kind of" because often, it's not feasible to have a customer on-site all the site (either because of budget-constraints or just being a jerk, anyways, that's why tools like PivoTkr is great, you can let your "customer" tell their "stories" and you develop around that). But yes, it's centered around customer requirement and a sole developer can still pull it off.

I should add, most software framework these days (especially MVC/ORM/AD-based) almost force you to Agile (notoriously Cucumber on Rails). Get your customer need(s), develop your Model(s) -- put their stories in the controller's logic, show them a completed part (in some View of some sort) <--> Repeat (assuming you're not strictly doing BDD/TDD, I often don't >.<).

It's common for companies to acquire companies and do things with them to make them profitable. Assuming you own a web development company, and your team has decided to acquire www.nairaland.com, what will you do to make it profitable in the 9ja market. (Please NO Adwords or affiliate).

What will you design different? Will you change the business model? Will you turn it into something else entirely? Do you have an idea why faceoffestac.net (despite being, in my opinion a brilliant idea) failed?

logica:
1 => I said Pair Programming is a feature of Agile Programming; will you expect a feature to be mentioned as part of the generic tenets? Pair Programming itself is a tenet of Extreme Programming of which Agile Programming is a type (depending on the source XP is the super-set or the subset). You will notice I said "most likely".
,

2 => You should also note these methodologies expect a team. So if you are solo, you are obviously not using XP/Agile.

3 => Anyway you need to properly understand Pair Programming and to use it properly to appreciate it. If you are the type that likes to write all kinds of unstructured code, you will of course not like it.

1. Superb clarification on #1, can't be overstated. I should however point out (as you've done earlier, vaguely) Agile extracted the best of these following designing methodology: Extreme Programming (per Kent Black's), SCRUM, DSDM, Adaptive Software Development, Crystal, Feature-Driven Development, Pragmatic Programming (as described in Andy Hunt's 'The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master.), there are notable flops to them all ( and in fact one of XP's flop was the need for PP) -- a very good read might be: http://agilemanifesto.org/history.html

2. See point #1, no, it's not obvious. I used pivotal tracker reasonably (www.pivotaltracker.com) which premises you are agiling (unless you think the customer as part of the team, which Agile assumes they "kind of" are).

3. Ditto point #1.

logica:
, So if you are not doing Pair Programming, you are most likely not doing Agile.

^^ I beg to differ, see the principles of the Agile Manifesto

Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer
through early and continuous delivery
of valuable software.

Welcome changing requirements, even late in
development. Agile processes harness change for
the customer's competitive advantage.

Deliver working software frequently, from a
couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a
preference to the shorter timescale.

Business people and developers must work
together daily throughout the project.

Build projects around motivated individuals.
Give them the environment and support they need,
and trust them to get the job done.

The most efficient and effective method of
conveying information to and within a development
team is face-to-face conversation.

Working software is the primary measure of progress.

Agile processes promote sustainable development.
The sponsors, developers, and users should be able
to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.

Continuous attention to technical excellence
and good design enhances agility.

Simplicity--the art of maximizing the amount
of work not done--is essential.

The best architectures, requirements, and designs
emerge from self-organizing teams.

At regular intervals, the team reflects on how
to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts
its behavior accordingly.

Ref: http://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html

How is PP a pre-/requisite?

logica:
, So if you are not doing Pair Programming, you are most likely not doing Agile.

^^ I'd disagree, see the Agile Manifesto (http://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html)

We follow these principles:
Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer
through early and continuous delivery
of valuable software.

Welcome changing requirements, even late in
development. Agile processes harness change for
the customer's competitive advantage.

Deliver working software frequently, from a
couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a
preference to the shorter timescale.

Business people and developers must work
together daily throughout the project.

Build projects around motivated individuals.
Give them the environment and support they need,
and trust them to get the job done.

The most efficient and effective method of
conveying information to and within a development
team is face-to-face conversation.

Working software is the primary measure of progress.

Agile processes promote sustainable development.
The sponsors, developers, and users should be able
to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.

Continuous attention to technical excellence
and good design enhances agility.

Simplicity--the art of maximizing the amount
of work not done--is essential.

The best architectures, requirements, and designs
emerge from self-organizing teams.

At regular intervals, the team reflects on how
to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts
its behavior accordingly.

,  tell me why a sole developer cannot achieve these (in fact it's probably easier). In my experience, [XP] PP can sometimes be a drag.

^^ @logik couldn't agree more -- on a tangential note, now on to shameless begging:

I need seed money, how do we connect, I can pitch in less than 15mins?

See this interesting [related] discussion, might give you a clue: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/210635/teacher-time-schedule-algorithm

Haahhaaa, I actually agree with you, I just don't have that kind of money, really.

As you can see, the cost adds up pretty fast. I can only justify that cost if my site is generating a revenue that's covering that cost.

^^ you'd probably find a few of my post stuck in limbo there too, if you can unspam those too.

Oh I see, makes sense. Are those 20 you're deploying "sample" RoR apps or "live" apps (as in people are using it)? I strongly doubt you can deploy 20 RoR n a shared memory and not face a crippling (consider you have 512).

And if they're "sample" projects, that's what I consider educational computer. When I was learning Rails, I just deployed all to Heroku, and since it was learning it didn't really matter, I just used Rails built-in server -- I didn't use rails in any serious project, long-term maintenance was just too expensive for a cheap me.

When I start building Geleyi Platform (www.geleyi.com), I was split between RoR and a PHP MVC/ORM Framework, the cost of RoR for a small start-up like mine was just too much (in terms of resource and talent). Glad I choose PHP.

New Relics looks awesome! I don't have a need for it yet though, but I bet as geleyi nears lunch it will be inevitable.

^^ Extended the thread here, and my response is here also ==> https://www.nairaland.com/nigeria/topic-882208.0.html

This is an off-shoot of this post ==> https://www.nairaland.com/nigeria/topic-878253.0.html (please read that thread and understand what is being discussed before contributing):

Fayimora:

,
Developing something like amazon is DIFFERENT. There is a much higher level of abstraction in such a project. For instance, I would do something like:

- Make static pages available, integrate a blog/update system
- implement store with primary features
- include a few novel implementations to store
*** Deploy starter application!
- Implement rating system and deploy
- Implement recommendation system and deploy
- Implement search engine and deploy

. . . . and so on and so forth. We can also go into a much higher level of abstraction. By the way note that am talking from the implementation side of things.

Have your customer with you at all times? NO. Absolutely not. You only need you customer with you at certain times which are before, inbtw and after(not always true). Your customer tells you what they want --> you make stories out of it --> You tell them what you can deliver and when --> Halfway thru you present what you have, make sure you are on the right line and revalidate the tasks -->You deliver when the time comes --> and then you go over the cycle again.

Waterfall methodology MAINLY works for those with the resources(mainly financial but other things count). A small startup would care less because they provide in stages. Facebook wasn't built at once! WHere would Mark have gotten the resources from?? However Twitter was! Dorsey had enough money, not to talk more about the funding he got!

Anyways, we should probably continue this somewhere else so we don't derail this thread

Shouldn't you start with abstractions and work your way down (considering you might be using rails) --- and where does testing fall?

Or register with this link: http://www.ibreathe.com.ng/computer-science-students-congress-2012/

Fayimora:




Did I convince you to get a linode? 

I totally understand your point, if you believe you're getting the value off it, totally your call. Did you convince me to get linode, nope. I'm a very, very cheap guy, I be 9ja ninja after all -- I'm getting all my need met for way less (almost close to free). For work, I do sysadmin stuff, mostly because I have no choice.

On my personal project (which are mostly in PHP), I've been with www.hostmonster.com for years, meets my need. I'm only considering A2 because they do RoR 3+ / PHP (hostmonster does Rails 2+) I don't want to deal with sysadmin stuff, I like I can just call someone when sh3t breaks and they do more and better.

Maybe I can convince you to do all you're doing on Linode for free (I really still can't justify you paying for educational computing):

1. Get VMWare (http://www.vmware.com/products/workstation/overview.html, you can probably get a free copy from your school or "somewhere"
2. Get a Bitnami stack: http://bitnami.org/
3. Start coding and picking up chics.

And if you just don't care for any of those, just do Heroku (http://www.heroku.com/, they have a very sweet gem that integrates nice esp. if you're Cap'ing or maybe not) << this guys will host you for free on small projects and when you're ready to go "live" you pay-per-usage.

I'm a value seeker, linode is about ~20$/month for their cheapest offer (?). I'm saying it's too expensive based on what you're using it for -- on A2, see their "StartUp Web Hosting Plan," which is cheaper since its a shared hosting (if scalability and bandwidth aren't your concern, which, per what you're doing, it shouldn't). I get the flexibility argument but do you really want to be spending more of your time doing sysadmin vs. having them [the company] do it, and get remote SSH to their managed services (just saying).

I agree their site doesn't look very appealing, but I doubt that matters much.

Isn't that a bit expensive? or are you hosting yourself? See this guy's overing: http://www.a2hosting.com/

csharpjava:
Agile will not be suitable for a project like Ebay and Amazon, waterfall will be the ideal methodology, as Ebay and Amazon will not want their customers to place their orders but find out that the payment gateway is not yet ready or the delivery functionality has not yet been developed. Agile is suitable for less complex projects and might cost more due to pair programming and all the other processes involved.

I agree. Relating to this particular project (Ebay/Amazon clone), I don't see the need for agile, there are many Open Source projects that have already abstracted the problem Ebay/Amazon are trying to solve. Get one of them, customize away. Now where the "Waterfall-ing" might be more beneficial is, making the project successful (otherwise it will be *just* another clone). In fact, in this project, forget developing [yet] and plan/strategize strongly what problem your business (*not software*) wants to solve.

On the other hand, let's say one is solving a problem that is not a clone of Ebay/Amazon -- Agile (pure XP: http://www.extremeprogramming.org/ is slightly expensive for small project, I'm not a personal fan really) all the way.

Say I'm trying to develop a site that aggregates using Ebay/Amazon's API and suggests a local Nigerian alternative vendor (Not a trivial problem but jeez, that's a f88king cool idea, @OP maybe you should do that instead), Agile it is -- waterfall is a lot, lot more expensive (all those planning, meetings, meetings, and all the sh%t everyone will forget about after more meetings). Get some folks in your target market (your alpha tester or pseudo-requirement setters), set http://www.pivotaltracker.com/ in motion, get your project on www.bitbucket.org private, open up RubyMine (if you want to use RoR) or PHPStorm (if you're going Symfony or Cake) or PyCharm (if you're going the Django way), and slam away. Extra credit if you care for Cucumber/RSpec (if you're doing RoR it's hardly an option anyways) or EnhancePHP/PHPUnit.

Waterfall is dying rather slowly, it's expensive and unpredictable.

*dhtml:
This delomos guy is getting worse by the day - and these are PHP pros he is talking to like this.
@Beaf, i said it, he is going to die of ignorance and stoopidity - in this day and age of internet, really sad. Webdezzi, make we leave am alone
o jare - it is too late to save him.

*chuckle, PHP pros indeed* :: On a slightly related note: http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/jayz/takeover.html (hint: last verse)

Fayimora:
I think you should be more worried about the spambot. It's has an interest in you, lol

haaahaaa, true that, already being banned once. Will be in my best behavior.

Very much so, you app will however be a web-app (see php+html5, you'd generally want to have n addition to PHP skills, good knowledge of JavaScript, CSS and HTML).

If you're looking into making it native, look at: https://www.phonegap.com/

kodewrita:
A paypal clone would be charging money from the get-go which still tallies with what he's saying as against trying to build something that requires a lot of traffic to succeed.

True but how about the issue of trust though, like the case of https://www.eyowo.com/ ?

I wish I should just stop as promised by, but boy, I don't want people running into this thread and reading @beaf bu11sh3t  -- my god!!

You want to learn the right way to send mail in PHP: http://www.php.net/manual/en/book.mail.php. Simple. If that doesn't do it for you, go use your super sweet language or heck create yours (which is likely since you're all mouth).

And,

Beaf:
JavaScript uses the ECMA-262 standard just like Mono C# and .NET C# use C#'s ECMA and ISO standards.

[size=18pt]Not a problem, Provide me a link for JavaScript and Python's like you did for RubySpec. Otherwise revert your line of argument that a a language without official DS is cut and nail. And prevent me from ripping it apart.[/size]

Mine here, https://www.nairaland.com/nigeria/topic-864237.0.html (rather light, hoping to get it robust)

Fayimora:
BAN YOURSELF!!!

That's the spirit @Fayimora

I wanted to be nastier but I would be considered a trouble maker.

okeyxyz:
, who says a clone of paypal cannot work here? it is a virgin market here, paypal has yet refused to come in, so if you can quickly set one up & adapt it locally, then it should be a success story.

I very much agree, and that's in fact what has helped some local company in China. Till date, Google finds it hard to compete with the local search engine there, and even the facebook "clone" there.

But remember he mentioned the government does not favor clones -- having a facebook/google/twitter clone geared towards a local market takes having a solid business model which most just don't have.

Fayimora:
OK so when is all this gonna stop? I am gonna have to lock this thread if it doesn't. C'mmon guys!!!

Me I just dey do jeje o, I generally wouldn't even respond at all, but @Beaf's ignorance in thinking that being loud, or name calling or anything is a logical approach to making an argument against a langauge.

If you don't understand a language's strength or idioms, it's ok. But don't go ahead saying everyone should ignore it.

That said, @webdezzi made an interesting point, (and it illustrates my point as above, understanding how a language approaches solving a problem is more important than ____ ) ,

webdezzi:
,
emails are never actually sent by php or perl or python except its an smtp server written in any of these languages.

@

Fayimora:
I disagree with the "NIgerian startups" and "3rd world countries" thing

Why?

lordZOUGA:
I think the problem is laziness, We are jus too lazy to think,