Pair Development: How Programmers and Testers Benefit

Automated tests are a foundation of agile software development. Many experts teach that developers should write unit tests and testers should write higher-level tests. However, many of the practices, such as test-driven development and pair programming, say little about how programmers and testers could work together. Shannon Prue (developer) and Dawn Cannan (tester) describe and demonstrate the interactions between the developer and tester pairing to implement a user story. Early in the process they agree on story scope, develop a shared vocabulary, and work together to understand the technical and logical details. The tester learns the developer’s approach to solving the problem and begins to design the associated test approach. The developer learns what will be tested, resulting in more solid production code from the beginning. As they write tests and code, Shannon and Dawn show specific examples of how pairing helps prevent defects from ever getting into the code.