You might know the game of ping-pong, aka table tennis. You might know pair programming. But have you ever thought of putting them together? No, we don't pass the keyboard by smacking it with a paddle. It's much less violent and more useful than that, as a technique to combine pairing and test-driven development (not really ping-pong) in a fun way.

This talk will demonstrate Ping-Pong Pair Programming, on a problem chosen by the audience, in a language chosen by the audience. If time allows, we will also demonstrate "Smart@$$" Ping-Pong Pair Programming, in which each dev tries to force the other into doing the actual hard work.

I can do this as a normal breakout session, or if you want, I could possibly turn it into a workshop.

Prior knowledge needed: only basic concepts of unit testing, as I will explain TDD and pairing (and ping-pong). Though there are a variety of languages the demo could be done in, all are fairly English-like and should be reasonably understandable to all devs.

Ideally this has two speakers (other one TBD), but I can alternately take a volunteer from the audience, or a series of them.

The concept is language/technology-agnostic, so it could go at an agnostic conf or one centered around any language. If your conference is about a language I don't know, I can probably learn it (and its typical testing tools) at least enough to pair up with someone who does, so I can still do the talk at your conference.

This has been submitted to some conferences, but not yet accepted (nor rejected), let alone performed. I have several potential co-speakers, and even if none of them are available, I could use a volunteer from the audience, or maybe multiple of them.

The rough outline so far:

- Very briefly recap what are ping-pong, pair programming (mentioning test-driven development), and TDD.

- Ask the audience what language they want us to work in, from among those (up to four or so) that my co-speaker and I have in common. (Or if I couldn't recruit a co-speaker, just those I'm ready to do.)

- Ask the audience which of a few different fairly simple functions to code up using this technique, or maybe additional suggestions. Candidates so far include "FizzBuzz response for one number" and "next state of a cell in Conway's Game of Life, given its current state and number of neighbors". We may do multiple if time allows.

- DO IT!

- Recap good/bad parts of that experience.

- If time allows, demonstrate "Smart@$$" Ping-Pong Pair Programming, in which each dev tries to make the other do the "real work", by writing a test that can only be made to pass that way, while also trying to *avoid* doing the "real work" by writing code that passes all tests so far BUT is even simpler.