Pair Programming Workflow Suggestions

Hello Everyone,

I'm interested in hearing how people use Git for pair programming. Specifically, how do you document that you are programming in pairs. Typically, of course, you have a driver and a navigator. It seems natural to have a commit's author be the driver at the time, but that doesn't seem to do justice to what pair programming is. Really, both people are normally coding, but one person is doing the typing and most of the thinking while the other is acting as an in place code reviewer. There are even cases where there's a third person involved.

I did find [Brian Helmkamp's script](http://www.brynary.com/2008/9/1/setting-the-git-commit-author-to-pair-programmers-names) but that's not really what I'm looking for. For instance, that would break the nice integration we have with Hudson at this point for displaying when a developer was last active. It would be nicer to have an arbitrary number of authors that can all exist separately, but I'm fairly certain that git does not support that.

Thoughts?

On Tue, 15 Sep 2009 13:43:17 -0400 Tim Visher <tim.visher@gmail.com> wrote:

[...]

Tim,

If you're just looking for a way to quickly switch the author information quickly between individual commits. You could create a shell alias for each of the programmers that does:

   export GIT_AUTHOR_NAME="some name" GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL="name@where.com"

This will override the global and per repo configured author information for all subsequent commits.

HTH, Sean

On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 2:14 PM, Sean Estabrooks <seanlkml@sympatico.ca> wrote:

That is an interesting idea. My point is really that having a committer and an author is something that makes sense in terms of non-pairing. Especially in the OS world where developers may never even get to meet, let alone code together, one developer writes a feature somewhere and then submits it to the maintainer and the maintainer puts it in. Pairing, on the other hand, is much more tightly integrated than that. Just like in Brian's post, it's really a situation of Dev1 _&_ Dev2 wrote this feature, but one of them happened to be typing and doing most of the nitty-gritty developing. Changing the authors between committs almost seems to introduce an arbitrary level of distinction where it's no longer _both_ but _one then the other_. Does that make my question any clearer?

The 16/09/09, Tim Visher wrote:

FMPOV (and to follow the Pair Programming purpose), there isn't an "I" in "Pair". So having the same author name and sign-off for each pair is what makes most sense. IMHO, "dev1_and_dev2" is actually the best option.

On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 10:17 AM, Nicolas Sebrecht <nicolas.s.dev@gmx.fr> wrote:

That's certainly interesting. I guess I just assumed, not having too much practical experience with actually pairing, that the driver would be doing most of the coding for a given commit… It's true that that's not really the case.

Do you guys use Hudson or something similar when you're pairing? How's your experience regarding how it interoperates with the dev_1_and_dev_2 naming convention?

Tim Visher <tim.visher@gmail.com> writes:

[...]

I'm not sure if this would help you, but take a look at "Pair Programming & git & github & Gravatar & You & You" blog post by Jon "Lark" Larkowski from May 30, 2009:

  http://blog.l4rk.com/2009/05/pair-programming-git-github-gravatar.html

On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 2:20 PM, Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com> wrote:

Unfortunately my company firewall is blocking that post. I'll have to read it later. Thanks for the pointer though!