Background: Distributed Pair Programming can be performed via screensharing or via a distributed IDE. The latter offers the freedom of concurrent editing (which may be helpful or damaging) and has even more awareness deficits than screen sharing. Objective: Characterize how competent distributed pair programmers may handle this additional freedom and these additional awareness deficits and characterize the impacts on the pair programming process. Method: A revelatory case study, based on direct observation of a single, highly competent distributed pair of industrial software developers during a 3-day collaboration. We use recordings of these sessions and conceptualize the phenomena seen. Results: 1. Skilled pairs may bridge the awareness deficits without visible obstruction of the overall process. 2. Skilled pairs may use the additional editing freedom in a useful limited fashion, resulting in potentially better fluency of the process than local pair programming. Conclusion: When applied skillfully in an appropriate context, distributed-pair programming can (not will!) work at least as well as local pair programming.
Second, Chong and Hurlbutt @cite_17 , after informal data analysis of on-site, everyday, industrial pair programming, formulate even more strongly . They also note that . They assume this to be a disadvantage of local pair programming and recommend the use of dual keyboards and dual mice to make driver changes maximally fluent in the local case. For the distributed case, they advise against tools of the RPP and strict DPP kind that enforce and hence emphasize the driver non-driver distinction. Their article does not discuss the problems that may result from having and using editing freedom in a reduced-awareness situation, however.
@cite_17
2113208984 2160641905 1982284258 2104906962
This paper presents data from a four month ethnographic study of professional pair programmers from two software development teams. Contrary to the current conception of pair programmers, the pairs in this study did not hew to the separate roles of "driver" and "navigator". Instead, the observed programmers moved together through different phases of the task, considering and discussing issues at the same strategic "range " or level of abstraction and in largely the same role. This form of interaction was reinforced by frequent switches in keyboard control during pairing and the use of dual keyboards. The distribution of expertise among the members of a pair had a strong influence on the tenor of pair programming interaction. Keyboard control had a consistent secondary effect on decisionmaking within the pair. These findings have implications for software development managers and practitioners as well as for the design of software development tools. Given the ease that humans have with using a keyboard and mouse in typical, non-colocated computer interaction, many studies have investigated the value of colocating the visual field and motor workspaces using immersive display modalities. Significant understanding has been gained by previous work comparing physical tasks against virtual tasks, visuomotor colocation versus non-colocation, and even visuomotor rotational misalignments in virtual environments (VEs). However, few studies have explored all of these paradigms in context with each other, and it is difficult to perform interstudy comparisons because of the variation in tested motor tasks. Therefore, using a stereoscopic fish tank display setup, the goal for the current study was to characterize human performance of a 3D Fitts' point-to-point reaching task using a stylus-based haptic interface in the physical, colocated non-colocated, and rotated VE visualization conditions. Five performance measures---throughput, efficiency, initial movement error, corrective movements, and peak velocity---were measured and used to evaluate task performance. These measures were studied in 22 subjects (11 male, 11 female, ages 20--32) performing a 3D variant of Fitts' serial task under 10 task conditions: physical, colocated VE, non-colocated VE, and rotated VEs from 45---315° in 45° increments. Hypotheses: All performance measures in the colocated VE were expected to reflect significantly reduced task performance over the real condition, but also reflect increased performance over the non-colocated VE condition. For rotational misalignments, all performance measures were expected to reflect the highest performance at 0°, reduce to the lowest performance at 90°, and rise again to a local maximum at 180° (symmetric about 0°). Results: All performance measures showed that the colocated VE condition resulted in significantly lower task performance than the physical condition and higher mean performance than the non-colocated VE condition, but the difference was not statistically significant. Also, rotation misalignments showed that task performance was mostly reduced to a minimum at 90°, 135°, and 225°. We conclude that colocated VEs may not significantly improve point-to-point reaching performance over non-colocated VEs. Also, visual rotations of ±45° affected throughput, efficiency, peak velocity, and initial movement error, but the number of corrective movements were not affected until ± 90°. This paper presents a general approach for the simultaneous tracking of multiple moving targets using a generic active stereo setup. The problem is formulated on the plane, where cameras are modeled as “line scan cameras,” and targets are described as points with unconstrained motion. We propose to control the active system parameters in such a manner that the images of the targets in the two views are related by a homography. This homography is specified during the design stage and, thus, can be used to implicitly encode the desired tracking behavior. Such formulation leads to an elegant geometric framework that enables a systematic and thorough analysis of the problem at hand. The benefits of the approach are illustrated by applying the framework to two distinct stereo configurations. In the first case, we assume two pan-tilt-zoom cameras, with rotation and zoom control, which are arbitrarily placed in the working environment. It is proved that such a stereo setup can track up to N = 3 free-moving targets, while assuring that the image location of each target is the same for both views. The second example considers a robot head with neck pan motion and independent eye rotation. For this case, it is shown that it is not possible to track more than N = 2 targets because of the lack of zoom. The theoretical framework is used to derive the control equations, and the implementation of the tracking behavior is described in detail. The correctness of the results is confirmed through simulations and real tracking experiments. This paper presents an alternative to the Potential Field Method of computing local collision-free motions for general manipulators. The main distinction is that we separate the description of the task from constraints of anti-collision. This enables to control accurately all relevant measures of the problem. A task is expressed by the minimization of a function plus eventually some geometric constraints, whereas anti-collision is translated into very simple linear constraints through the methods of the velocity dampers and the tangent separating planes. This approach is applied to the control of manipulators with a high number of degrees of freedom, using hierarchical descriptions of the environment and the robots. This is illustrated by two realizations, path planning for a ten link manipulator in the cluttered environment of a nuclear plant reactor, and cooperative tasks between two six degree of freedom robots. In the end we discuss how to incorporate the action of a global planner in this general framework.