Nick Carroll

There is nothing more boring than sitting and watching your Pair hack away at the keyboard during a “pair programming” session. You lose interest in the problem and drift away to LaLa land.

Sharing the keyboard means engaging both Pairs in solving the problem. If you aren’t sharing the keyboard and allowing your pair to interact with the story being developed, then you may as well be coding by yourself.

Keyboard hogging is generally symptomatic of a lack of test driven development (TDD). TDD is a good practice to get into when pair programming. It allows for one person to write a failing test, and the other to make the test pass. Then the roles are reversed so that each person takes it in turn to think of a test to write, so that the other can make it pass. This is sometimes called ping pong programming because the keyboard goes back and forth quite frequently.

How do you know if you have a keyboard hogger on your team? Well that was the question that I’ve been pondering on for a while. Some people just don’t know they are keyboard hoggers. So you need something visual and metrics based to expose the problem. Something like a chess clock.

I used to play chess competitively and to prevent people taking forever with their move you had to clock-in when it was your thinking time, and clock-out when you finally made your move. The clock added that extra bit of pressure to get a move on.

When the opposition is clocked-in you still have to remain actively engaged in the game as you have to work out a strategy to counteract a number of possible moves that your opponent could make.

Pair programming should be more like this. It certainly makes it a lot more enjoyable. I remember the best programming sessions I’ve had was with Stacy Curl, now an ex-thoughtworker and whom I believe was also a chess player. He would always look to quickly make my tests pass, even if it was to just echo the output that my tests would sometimes expect. This often forced me to think about triangulating my tests so that my pair had no choice but to do some heavy lifting and implement the code.

If you have a keyboard hogger on your team, then try and introduce a chess clock. The timed metrics should make it obvious that only one person is engaged in developing the story, and the other is just pondering about the meaning of life.