My experiences show that pair programming is not only a development practice, but a culture you learn and master by practicing. I’ve been working in development teams where pair programming is not adopted well. In most cases we prefer working alone and that causes issues related with communication problems from time to time.
To improve our pair programming skills in addtion to other development practices, I organized and facilitated a private coderetreat with 18 developers few weeks ago. I got very positive feedback from attendees showing that I am on the right direction. Coderetreat could be repeated several times a year (per month, maybe) but it is not feasible to organize it very frequently. So I tried to find new activities to improve our pair programming skills. This activity should be simple to implement by the beginners. That’s why starting to pair program full time seems not to be good option, at least at this stage.
What I found is pretty simple to implement: Pair Hour. Pair Hour can be described as “pairing (at least) 1 hour each day for 1 week”. Here are the rules:
- One volunteer should organize this activity, observe pairs and facilitate meetings.
- Every developer should develop whatever they need to do via pair programming 1 hour each day.
- The work could be any kind of development, like new feature development, bug fix and design.
- Practice TDD and Ping-pong programming as if you are in a coderetreat activity.
- Your pair could be your teammate, or someone else from any other team.
- In a daily standup meeting, each developer finds his/her pair. People can also share their experiences if they want. The meeting should not exceed 15 minutes.
- You should switch your pair everyday. (if you have less than 6 developers in your team, you will need pair with the same person for several times)
- If you cannot find a pair from your team, you should ask from people on other teams.
- Pair hour will start on monday with a opening ceramony.
- Pair hour will end on friday with a closing ceramony.
- In closing ceramony, we will do retrospective to share our experiences.
Closing ceramony is the time you collect feedback and adapt accordingly. You can either continue “pair hour” activity on the next weeks, or wait for few weeks and try again. This is the route that I plan to follow lately.
Next week we will experience “pair hour”. I will add what we experienced with you.
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Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
