Rather than whine about not having enough good pairing experiences, I’ve decided to do something about it. Recently I’ve had a few pairing sessions online, and I decided that the software to build would start around the simple notion of scheduling online pairing sessions.
The idea is to slowly start building an online pairing community. I imagine there are many kinds of participants, people who want to:
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build quality software via pairing and TDD
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promote their services and ability to mentor via pairing
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get some work done on a real product
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get in touch with other members of the agile community
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learn about either pairing or TDD
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learn about the effectiveness of distributed pairing
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learn a specific technology (Java, Rails, JMock, RSpec, etc.)
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improve their Ward number for bragging purposes
I hope that the scheduler software will be all that and many more. Initially, I created a wiki as a scratch pad area, to help set up sessions, to hold an initial backlog of stories around the scheduler itself, and to record experiences.
I chose Java, but only because of interests in my pairing partner. I’m not sure that the pairing scheduler should be Java, but for now it is. If Java, what represents the best choice for front end (web) technologies?
Please feel welcome to join up and post your recommendations and experiences at the wiki site. Interested developers should send me an email with their intents, and I’ll set up their SourceForge account to have appropriate access.
