Collaborating on mobile app design through pair programming: A practice-oriented approach overview and expert review

In many of today´s small companies and startups, developers may not give enough attention to the importance of UX/UI design for the product under development. Moreover, such small teams may lack the required organization skills that help them to collaborate and work together. As a result, such teams usually face problems with delivering the “right” product, as well as not being able to follow a sustainable development process. In a similar context, CS students in programming classes are facing almost the same problems of small teams in industry. To tackle these problems, various approaches for integrating agile development methods and UX design methods have been proposed to help developers carefully consider the UX requirements, and to be able to organize their work environment. In this paper, we explore how such integration can be a good fit for both CS students and software developers, especially for those who work on mobile development. We present our proposed set of integration guidelines, and then we focus on Pair Programming (PP) as an agile practice that promotes a collaborative work environment. The expert reviews conducted in this paper helped us exlore how PP can be introduced to CS students (and later, to developers in the market) to support collaborative work environments. Moreover, Using PP in class provides an adaptive and collaborative teaching approach that can be used in CS programming labs. We also discuss the pitfalls that can affect developers during PP sessions, and how to avoid such negative effects. We conclude by providing a set of recommended practices that can be applied to introduce PP for developers in both academic and industrial contexts.