I was looking at Chris Sepulveda’s recent post on “Integrating Testers into XP: Initial Thoughts”, and was intrigued by his mention of “paired debugging”. I had the good fortune to be able to do that a couple of times on a recent project and feel that it worked incredibly well. I’m interested in how it has worked for others and whether it was intentional or not. (If I have misunderstood your use of the term “paired debugging”, Chris, please correct me!)
In my case, we had a team that was highly collaborative and incredibly competent on all fronts. We didn’t start that way, of course, but by the time the paired debugging sessions took place, we had developed a healthy mutual respect and a good deal of trust. It was not an XP project, but it was not entirely a traditional approach either. None of our sessions were called out as intentionally paired debugging events. They emerged from the desire of the programmers to solve some tricky and complex coding challenges and the willingness and ability of testers to sit through debugging sessions. The developers wanted to nail their bugs for good after they had gotten a series of related defects on several releases in a row. The testers wanted to stop finding variations on the same bugs in release after release. I was the tester and went through the code in question in an extensive debugging session with the programmer. It was very satisfying and productive in many ways.
On the other hand, I was glad that I didn’t have to explain to any project manager what category I would have charged that time to since it was far in excess of what was considered normal for “defect analysis”. I also don’t know how much programming knowledge the tester needs to have to really be helpful. It did seem to help considerably in my situation, but I don’t have anyone else’s experience to compare to. What experiences have others had with these two issues, time accounting and development expertise of the tester? How important is the existence of trust and a collaborative environment to the effectiveness of paired debugging? Has it been applicable to non-XP projects for others as well?
To provide some context for my comments, I want to explain some of my biases and background. If this sort of thing bothers you, by all means skip the rest of this post. For those who appreciate knowing a bit more about me, I hope this helps.
I confess that I probably would not have heard of blogs, or have gotten so interested in them, if it weren’t for my husband’s current passion for them (see Andy Tinkham’s blog). As it is, I could only hear him bring up someone’s comments from their blog so many times before I had to see what they said for myself. At that point, it became but a short leap to wanting some outlet to express my thoughts on their thoughts. (Anyone who knows me or has worked with me for long can tell you that it is rare for me to lack ideas on others’ thoughts!)
I started out primarily as a math and science geek at a time when only some women were doing so. As an undergraduate in a liberal arts school, I discovered that I had a chance to explore things that didn’t make as much sense to me, like those “artsy” sorts of people. I chose theatrical design for a major, ended up learning far more and very different things than I had imagined I would, and struggled the entire time to excel in a field that I was just not really built for. Later ventures into computer science, accounting, management information systems, organizational theory and industrial psychology were much more my style. The end result of that initial diversion has been a permanent focus on the value of effective communication, developing and percieving multiple perspectives, and the need for collaboration in the activities of my chosen field of software development. (I also made the statement that I would never again work with computers after a harrowing experience with the Dartmouth timeshare system and a statistics class, but that’s another story.)
As I considered this initial post, I struggled with defining myself in a cohesive and focused manner. Do I see myself as a software tester, business analyst, project manager, QA manager, business process architect, or all of the above? Does it matter that I have also dabbled in design, coding, and across many kinds of systems? How does my role impact my statements and thoughts about my field? Andy insightfully suggested that I just begin rather than fret about the answers to those questions since the act of blogging would, over time, answer them anyway. As a consequence, I will mention that my current work involves software testing, so most of my thoughts these days are biased in that direction. Other than that, it will just have to emerge as we go.
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