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Posted: January 5, 2018 |
Indeed pairs in studies over the past 20+ years have consistently written higher quality code and written it faster than solo coders. So, while it feels like there’s a “halving” of developers by pairing them up, as one of the original pair programming studies put it: “The defect removal savings should more than offset the development cost increase.”If the pairs rotate frequently, the theory says you’ll get better diffusion of knowledge across the team: no one person builds up a fief of knowledge around, say, builds, or how the “Print Invoice” function works. This means there’s a lower “bus factor,” helping protect against team churn and brain-drain.Large organisations I talk with - who’re all trying to figure out the footwork for that “digital transformation” dance - use rotating pairing as a way to spread new technical knowledge, but also change that oh so mysterious “culture” in their organisation.Much like alcohol and black coffee, pairing tastes awful at first... until you start imbibing of it repeatedly. In most of the studies, and the feedback I hear from organisations doing it nowadays, pairing practitioners end up liking it after just a few weeks. At first, true, the usually solitary programmer has to, you know, talk to someone else. They even have to get used to be corrected by someone else – horrors of all horrors! But, with a rigorous enough schedule that allows for breaks and bounds the programming time to normal 9-to-5 schedules, most people end up liking pairing after a while. It only takes a few pints to dedicate your life to it.It’s hard to say why people like it more, but I suspect it has something to do with the fact that humans, fundamentally, like being social, so long as it feels safe. Also, most programmers and operations people take pride in their craft: they want to do good work (despite what those overflowing tickets queues are doing to them). If pair programming increased quality, there’s more to be proud of.Managers of these programmers should also like the quality, speed, and predictability of pairing.That predictability comes from an interesting side effect of how exhausting pair programming is. For one, it’s harder to goof off – er, “check email” – and attend meetings when you’re pair programming. As the man from downtown said: “Always Be Coding.”And, on that kind of schedule, developers are straight up pudding-headed after seven or eight hours of pair programming. As one practitioner put it: “This makes pair programming intense, especially at the beginning. At the end of the first day, I couldn't go home. Before I could face humans again, I put my phone on airplane mode, ignored my usual online accounts, and went to the gym for two hours of self-imposed isolation.”Developers can only pair so long. They have to stop, so you just close up shop at 5. No more playing Doom until 10pm and then coding – er, I mean “working late. It can come off as sounding a bit like nanny-management, but pair programming seems to induce developers to actually do the work.While the research is sparse (and, really, when it’s “n=whatever students enrolled in my CS class” it’s a little fishy), from where I sit and what people keep telling me, pair programming works. Should you be doing it all the time, though?I’ve heard practitioners say that you should at least do it for complex, difficult tasks. If it’s some routine coding or operations tasks, then pairing may not be the nitro-charge you’re expecting. Indeed, one of the studies suggests that pairing is the most beneficial for “challenging programming problems.Put another way, if the task is “boring,” maybe it’s better to solo it. Still, I can’t help but think that it’ll be the boring tasks that end up biting you, especially when it comes to pair sysadmining. After all, how many systems have come down because of the boredom of DNS configurations? Open is always going to win, states Ed Hemphill, CEO of WigWag, a company that hopes to make sense of the ever-expanding and ever-more-complex Internet of Things market.WigWag is named after the traditional flags used by the US military's Signal Corps to communicate messages
. Hemphill and his cofounder Travis McCollum both served in the Signal Corps before starting up their company in Austin, Texas. Unlike their main competitors – SmartThings, owned by Samsung, and Wink – WigWag plans to use the power of open source software and the broader technical community to create the solution that more and more people are asking for: a way to make the disparate world of smart-home products function together.Open source is ultimately more flexible, Hemphill notes, and since it's completely exposed, it is far more likely that bugs will be found.Like so many other IoT companies, WigWag has its own smart lightbulb and room sensor – covering everything from motion and noise to temperature and humidity – but its real focus is on its gateway hub. Its goal is both simple and complex: create a way for people to easily control multiple different products.To do so, it has several different components in its $149 relay that work with the main IoT standards: one covering Z-Wave; one covering ZigBee; another that will work with Bluetooth LTE. It is working on full support for Google's Thread protocol and will add Wi-Fi later this year. In short, anything that is out there, it will try to work with.Most critically however, the whole thing is built using Javascript, Go code and C/C++ and, Hemphill stresses, everything will be open sourced. When a new product comes out, a simple .js file – created by WigWag or, the company hopes, by a community of coders – will be added to the system, then downloaded and updated.
It is a system that is desperately needed. The IoT market is so diverse, with every product seemingly requiring its own app (and sometimes its own hub), that it has actually started to hold the market back. What's worse is that consumers' number one concern – security – suffers. Most products use and store your home Wi-Fi as a way of communicating, but sloppy security has repeatedly made those authentication details accessible, opening up your entire home's system to attack.Hemphill sees the problem as an opportunity. The assumption has always been that everything outbound is fine, and you just need to protect from stuff coming in, he notes, but that's just not the case any more.Until very recently, everything on your network was pretty simple – a laptop, a PC, a mobile phone – but now with people adding new products, many of which are running software that could be years out of date, the problem could be inside the network.People are adding weird stuff now, he notes. That new product you buy might be running Linux 2.8 [we're on 4.8]. The SDK could be five years old.Hemphill is all too aware of this problem: in the US Signal Corps, by the time technology worked its way down to the troops – through the bureaucracy and multitude of defense companies that all wanted to take their cut – it was already out of date. It's a long time ago, but I can remember Windows XP coming out and being given new gear running NT4. That's 2001 and 1996 to save you wracking your brains. Not that WigWag's product has the solution to the problem. At least not yet. The company is working on a firewall within its product that will give you greater control over what your smart-home products actually do.Hemphill gives two examples. If you have a Belkin product, for example, you want to make sure it is only communicating with Belkin's cloud service. Anything else and something unusual may be happening.Equally, if you have, say, a webcam in your bedroom. You don't want it to be on all the time – particularly when you are in the room at night. But as things currently stand, the company you bought the camera from has a surprising degree of control over that. No one is going to physically turn off a camera every night, but a gateway could electronically shut it off on a time schedule you decide upon. You want to be able to turn if off, and say 'I own the LAN', he argues, and that includes it not talking to the mothership.By being open source, not only do the security problems get smaller – because of all the eyeballs on it – but the ability to work with new products grows. What's more, the approach can keep old products alive. When Nest/Google killed the Revolv hub, people rightly freaked out. What is less known is the decision by TCP to end support for its lightbulb hub. Hemphill says that WigWag has effectively brought that hub back to life by allowing the bulbs to continue to communicate.
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