What I learn from 014 conference talk: Pair testing by Raji Bhamidipati

BDDX ’2016 in London PAIR TESTING

    Sometimes ago, I  managed to watch Pair testing by Raji Bhamidipati from #BDDx'2016 and it was great. It was about pair working (from tester point of view).

It was interesting talk about pair working with focus on pair testing.

What I took from this talk :

• Different styles of pair testing
• Expect-Expert like Exploring tester with Security tester, where instead of going back with feedback and forwards . Time saved on loop
  Expert-Novice
  Novice-Novice works because they have different strategies so while
  Driver-Navigator
  Ping-Pong Pairing swapping
  Mob popular in testing. Group of people testing at the same time.
• Advantages
• Team building and collaboration
• Share knowledge
• Mix of skill set based on requirement
• Disadvantages of pair testing
• work overload
• conflicts when paired incorrectly due personality incompatibility
• do not let pair testing create favouritism or elitism within your teams. let's opportunities to everybody not only one person.
• When to pair
• training newbies
• coaching and mentioning other team members
• when deadlines approaching (dev-test pairing)
• Common problems with introduction of pair testing
• fair of change
• not time efficient as 2 people are  doing the same task

In my person opinion pair working is great for many reason (some of them are mentioned above) . I think communication and argument skills are one of the most important to improve while doing pair working. Communication seems be obvious but why argument ? Well , you need to learn how to argue to get best output based on comprise of few opinions without hurting. From my experience using pair technique in valid context generated much better quality code , less buggy  and give higher confidence to all stakeholders. It doesn't need be applied all the time as some people suggest.
Anyway, if you haven't see this talk. It is worth check it out if you are interesting in pair testing (it applies to pair programming too).

Follow Raji Bhamidipati on:

Twitter:  https://twitter.com/raji_bh

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rajibhamidipati/