Test-driven roles for pair programming

The driver/navigator model of pair programming needs to be revised. We propose a model of programming in pairs where roles are based on test-driven development. Each programmer uses a different view of a shared development environment. One member of the pair writes tests, while the other implements the system. The programmers can cooperate as needed and move between different collaboration modalities. As part of a user-centered design process, we built a prototype web-based collaborative development environment for test-driven pair programming and ran a user study with professional software developers to evaluate the idea and identify research challenges. We used existing vocabularies and developed two novel visualizations to analyze the data, and found that the approach is feasible.