Expectations for Working with Partners

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.

  • 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 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.

  • 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.

  • If there is any issue with the partnership, contact the professor.

Taking time to design a plan for your solution together and to doing incremental implementation and testing together may seem like it is a waste of time, but in the long run it will save you a lot of time by making it less likely that you have design or logic errors in your solution, and by having a partner to help track down bugs and to help come up with solutions to problems.

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.

Your instructors want to help you have successful, productive, mutually supportive partnerships. Come see us if you would like some help with making your partnership meet these goals.