Another CodeRetreat took place at Inwerken on the 15.02.2019. The “hot topic” “Test Driven Development” was taken up and was presented in the SAP world.With the fact that the practical tasks of the last CodeRetreats proved themselves, it was decided that the task Conways Game of Life would be programmed this time. The play is about designing a logic that uses certain rules to either bring cells to life or to let them die. These cells would, thus, migrate and in the optimal case would be graphically displayed.
What is Pair Programming?
As with the last CodeRetreats the development technique Pair Programming was used. Pair programming is an agile software development technique in which two programmers work together at one workstation. One is the pilot and has the task of writing the code while the other is the navigator and dictates how and what should be programmed as well as reviewing each line of code as it is typed. While reviewing, the navigator also considers the strategic direction of the task and feeds ideas of how to improve the code.
Advantages/Disadvantages of Pair Programming?
The advantage of this development technique is very clear and it does not only encourage teamwork but it also promotes exchange of knowledge, sharing problems and solutions as well as learning and improving communication. Further advantage, in using this technique, is the improvement of software quality based on the well-known 4-eyes principle as software errors can be detected early.
The advantage of the knowledge exchange was, once again, used in this CodeRetreat. The teams were mixed in such a way that inexperienced programmers/participants were brought together with more experienced ones. The teams were never left without ideas as someone in the team always came up with an idea of how to handle a problem and yield a solution.
It has to be mentioned though, that there is a disadvantage as well in this plethora of advantages and this being the cost. Pair programming increases the man hours to deliver the code compared to programmers working alone. However, using pair programming, the resulting code has fewer defects.
Current exchange
For lunch, a very delicious catering was provided by Inwerken, which everyone thoroughly enjoyed. It was also discussed how to apply the just learnt topic practically. Other current topics were also discussed, such as SAPUI5 and S / 4 HANA. S / 4 HANA was especially a popular topic, being that an SAP CodeJam took place at Inwerken the day before, where it was shown how to migrate customer developments to S / 4 HANA.
