Partner Etiquette
For partnered lab assignments, you should follow these guidelines:
- The expectation is that you and your partner are working 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.
- We recommend that you do pair programming, where one of you types
and one of you watches and assists. You should swap roles
periodically, taking turns doing each part.
- 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 your
partner when he or she is not present. If there is a problem in the
code, then meet together to resolve it.
- If there is any issue with the partnership, contact the
professor.
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 it is less likely that you have design or logic errors in
your solution, 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 initiating scheduling times when
you can meet to work together, and for making time available in
your schedule for working together.