magpiebrain

Pairing Problems

I just got this from an old colleague:

Despite all of our many successes, our architect has started making noises to the product management team that pair programming is a waste of money.

Why should he let mountains of academic research and our own project metrics get in the way of his own personal opinions!?

Sometimes I just want to pack up and go home

Now first off, when people start talking in favour of Pair Programming, I tell them two things:

1. From what I’ve seen, it’s the most efficient way to transfer skills, reduce truck factor, ensure quality and (say it quietly) stop slacking. It’s also damn hard to get some companies to try it for a number of reasons.
2. Read this Hacknot article before you start quoting studies.

I don’t happen to agree with the editorial bais of the Hacknot site – my own (and my company’s own) experience has shown that we produce better software more efficiently when pairing. That said the study quoted is clearly flawed for the reasons mentioned. There have been more studies since – one day I should really get round to pulling them all together. The major problem in producing such a study is that I don’t know anyone who would spend the money creating a real world experiment over a long enough period of time to produce conclusive results.

I am however fairly sure that pairing with a cat yields no benefit over pairing with an alternate programmer.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 2nd, 2006 at 4:15 pm and is filed under Agile. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. It is tagged as pairing, agile, exreme-programming, xp, pair-programming over at Technorati