Seeking participants for an iOS/scrum boot camp

Idea: I want to put a small group of us (6-ish?) in a room for a week and develop an app. There may or may not be an iOS expert among us. We'd be using scrum/lean techniques and the goal is for each person to learn something new. The purpose of the end product is to demonstrate what we have learned.

Motivation: I need to become proficient at iOS programming. So, I am using this as an opportunity for me to conduct an experiment in alternative models for teaching software development/design, by holding a "boot camp" on the topic.

Who: Programmers, graphic designers, UX designers, and domain experts with some software-related learning objectives. You don't have to be the best programmer or have any experience in iOS; you just have to be motivated and want to learn. For example, you might be a programmer, but always wanted to try your hand at project management. Or you might run a non-profit and want to learn how to give requirements for some software. Or you may be graphic designer who wants to get more involved in programming.

Who Not: This boot camp is not suitable for people who are expecting a lecture and well-crafted assignments. It is also not a for someone looking for free labour to develop the app that they have been planning for a long time.

Where: Toronto, either at a home in the Yonge/Lawrence area or at UofT

When: First week of August. I imagined this to be 4-5 days, 9-5-ish with lunch breaks. But if I get enough interest from people who have day jobs, we might do this over two weekends. I am also looking into the possibility of providing childcare for participants.

How: We will be working in pairs most, if not all, of the time. We'll be doing short (1-day) sprints. We'll work hard, but we'll have a sustainable pace. We will all be working on an app together-- I make no promises on the quality of the final product. The app itself with depend on the learning objectives of the participants, and we will decide together during the planning meetings.

Next Steps: Drop me an email (benevolentprof at gmail) to let me know you're interested. Tell me a bit about yourself, your availability, and what you'd like to learn at the boot camp. We'll have one or two meetings in advance to identify our collective goals for the boot camp and to do some scrum planning.

When should we be using pair programming (or writing)?

I attended Certified Scrum Master training with Mike Cohn last week. I have been teaching agile and scrum to undergraduates for about six years now and I thought I should finally get my certification. Although I had the "book knowledge" down pat, I learned a lot from the Q&A and from the conversations that I had at my table. This post is the first of two that I will be writing about my experiences.

One of the people at my table was Andrew Mutz, Director of Software Engineering of AppFolio in Santa Barbara. He joined his organization two years ago and has been using scrum since then. I used the opportunity to pick his brains about his experiences. I was impressed by the software development practices that they use at his organization-- Lots of common sense and a good balance between engineering principle and business goals. (They're hiring, by the way.)

We got onto the topic of pair programming. We both agreed that there were many good things about pair programming. Appfolio has all new hires pair for the first three months or so. I didn't mention this at the time, but there are research literature to support some of our intuitions. Laurie Williams, Ron Kessler, and Ward Cunningham had a paper in IEEE Software in July/August 2000 on "Strengthening the Case for Pair Programming." They reported on studies by other researchers and their own work. Pairing increased the effort (person-hours) by 60%, but reduced the timeline (elapsed time) by 40%. Programmers produced higher quality code (pass more test cases), were happier, and were more confident.

We also agreed that not all tasks benefited from pairing. There were some tasks that were so simple (tedious?) that having another pair of eyes was not helpful.

However, we disagreed on the value of pairing on difficult tasks. Andrew argued that the value of pairing diminished with more complex tasks. Consequently, the graph of value vs. difficulty would look like a typical ROC (receiver operator characteristic) curve. This line is shown in blue in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Difficulty of Task vs. Value of Pair Programming

My impression was that the value of programming increased along with the difficulty of the task. This line is shown in green in Figure 1. Most of my direct experience with pairing is in writing and brainstorming research. But it's also based on conversations that I have had with professional developers who use pair programming. It's entirely possible that Andrew is right and I just haven't experience the top end of the difficulty axis.

Our conversation went on and we also agreed that pairing would be less useful for program comprehension, i.e. trying to understand an unfamiliar code base, if we used the conventional model. However, if we could have two people working side-by-side with a computer each, it might be useful to pair. On one occasion, I was working with two students to come up with a research question for a grant proposal. We were sitting around a table, each with our own computer. We went through cycles of brainstorming, critiquing each other's ideas, and doing searches of the academic literature to see what had been done before and to get new ideas. We managed to eliminate a lot of dead ends quickly.

I'm sure that there are other situations that are worth discussing.

What do you think? When should we be using (or not using) pair programming?