Partnership Expectations

For partnered lab assignments, you should follow these guidelines:

You and your partner should work together side by side in the lab for most, if not all, of the time you work on partnered lab assignments.
You and your partner should work on all aspects of the project together: initial top-down design, incremental testing and debugging, and final testing and code review.
If you are pair programming, where one of you types and one of you watches and assists, then you should swap roles periodically, taking turns.
There may be short periods of time where you each go off and implement some small part independently. However, you should frequently come back together, talk through your changes, push and pull each other’s code from the git repository, and test your merged code together.
You should not delete or significantly alter code written by a partner who is not present. If there is a problem in the code, meet together to resolve it.
If you are planning to attend office hours or otherwise seek help from instructional staff about a lab assignment, inform your partner about your plans.
If there is any issue with the partnership, contact an instructor as soon as possible. The longer you wait, the harder it is for us to help!

Taking time to design a plan for your solution together and doing incremental implementation and testing together may seem inefficient, but in the long run, it will save you time. By working together, your solutions are less likely to encounter design or logic errors, and you will more easily be able to track down and correct bugs.

Partnerships where partners work mostly independently rarely work out well and rarely result in complete, correct and robust solutions. Partnerships where partners work side-by-side for all or most of the time tend to work out very well. You and your partner are both equally responsible for scheduling times when you can meet to work together and for making time available in your schedule for working together.