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Software Engineering vocabulary · Agile and Team Workflow

Pair programming

Meaning in software engineering, with examples

nounCommon term

In software engineering, pair programming means: A way of working in which two developers write code together at one computer or shared screen: one types, while the other reviews and thinks ahead.

In Turkish: eşli programlama, ikili programlama

How it is used

The person typing is called the driver and the other the navigator; they switch roles often. It is popular for onboarding, tricky bugs and knowledge sharing. As a verb, people say 'let's pair on this' or 'pair with someone'.

Example sentences

  1. Pair programming with a senior developer helped me learn the codebase much faster.

  2. We did pair programming over a video call to fix the tricky caching bug.

Common collocations

  • pair on a task
  • pair programming session
  • driver and navigator
  • remote pairing
  • code reviewThe practice of teammates reading and commenting on each other's code changes before they are merged, to catch problems and share knowledge.
  • agileDescribing a way of working in short cycles, delivering small pieces often and changing plans based on feedback, instead of following one long fixed plan.
  • stand-upA short daily team meeting, often 15 minutes, where each person says what they did, what they will do next and whether anything is blocking them.
  • debugTo search for the cause of a problem in a program and remove it, often by running the code step by step and checking values.

More terms: Agile and Team Workflow

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