Workshop on Distributed Pair Programming

Tues, Aug. 6, 8:30 -- 12:00

Held as part of XP/Agile Universe 2002

Agile methodologies stress the need for close physical proximity of team members. However, circumstances may prevent a team from working in close physical proximity. For example, a company or a project may have development teams physically distributed over multiple locations. As a result, increasingly many companies are looking at adapting agile methodologies for use in a distributed environment.

The aim of this workshop is to bring together practitioners who have experiences with distributed pair programming. In addition, the workshop will be especially valuable to participants who are involved in development activity that is geographically distributed and are interested in applying distributed pair programming. We further want to incorporate experiences and research in Computer Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW) environments. Overall, the workshop will discuss how to make this type of distributed work as effective as possible and will help guide future research.

Submission Requirements

Anyone interested in participating in the workshop should submit a position paper by xxx. The position paper should be about 2-5 pages long and of one of the following formats:

• An experience report on using distributed pair programming.
• An experience report on a virtual/distributed team project that might benefit from distributed pair programming.
• Experiences with and information on CSCW environments for distributed pair programmers.

Activities

We propose a half-day workshop. Information about the workshop, the submissions, the presentations, the workshop minutes and the final outcome will be hosted on a web page on the internet. Invitations for this workshop will be posted to relevant mailing lists as well as newsgroups. Workshop activities will be organized into three types of sessions:

• An introductory session in which participants have a chance to make initial remarks
  
• Facilitated discussion session(s) in which participants have a chance to:
  • compare the differences in their experiences and approaches in using distributed pair programming,
  • seek synergy among different approaches,
  • identify solutions to common problems, and
  • discuss ways to compare the success factors in various distributed pair programming experiences
• A summary and feedback session in which participants have a chance to summarize what important commonalities and differences were revealed by the workshop, what issues of importance were identified, what actions should be taken, and in what form the results of the workshop should appear.

Organizers

David Stotts is an associate professor in the Computer Science Department at the Univ. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research interests are collaborative systems, systematic software testing, design patterns, and hypermedia. Prior to UNC he was on the faculty of Univ. of Maryland and Univ. of Florida, working with the NSF/industry SERC consortium, and has served on the program committees of ACM Hypertext, CSCW, Digital Libraries, and ICSE conferences.

Laurie Williams is an assistant professor at North Carolina State University. Her research areas focus on software engineering and include pair programming, software methodology, experimental software engineering, and testing. She is particularly interested in software engineering best practices for eCommerce and other entrepreneurial organizations. From 1984 - 1993, Laurie worked at IBM in Raleigh, North Carolina.

References

[XP] K. Beck, "Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change," Reading, Massachusetts: Addison Wesley Longman, Inc., 1999.

[DXP] M. Kircher, P. Jain, A. Corsaro, and D. Levine, "Distributed Extreme Programming," XP2001 - eXtreme Programming and Flexible Processes in Software Engineering, Villasimius, Sardinia, Italy, May 21-23, 2001

For more information, contact

David Stotts (stotts@cs.unc.edu) or
Laurie Williams (williams@csc.ncsu.edu).